Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 3: 5 Things That Must Happen
3. Fewer Human Characters
Why do people go and see a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie? Aside from clever pizza product placement, it's to see Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles! Make the movie about the title characters.
"Out of the Shadows" took a step in the right direction. The 2014 movie was essentially "Megan Fox: Featuring the TMNT," and it didn't work. "Out of the Shadows" at least took the title characters and made them the focus of the movie. But the human characters didn't get any better; Megan Fox still gave a disinterested and wooden performance.
Stephen Amell's plucky Casey Jones was painful to watch and the rest of the cast doesn't fare much better. I couldn't believe these movies somehow got Whoopi Goldberg and Laura Linney in small, insignificant roles. And the less said about Will Arnett, the better.
The main takeaway here is that these characters aren't interesting. So far, they've been used as the audiences' eyes to introduce us to the TMNT. But they haven't done it in an engaging way and failed in making us care about the human characters. By now, the audience knows who the Turtles are, so let's just stick with them.