Nerds That Geek Movie Review: 'Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III'

Written by Scott Edwards

Trying to do what is right in this day and age seems to be a losing battle.  With so many things that can and will get in your way, you may think that it is not worth the fight, but if you keep with it, you are bound to break down the barriers. So many people give up so quickly saying that it is not their fight, when in reality it is. Don’t ever let someone tell you that a noble effort is a waste of time, much less that it is not worth fighting for. These are the people that do not want to witness change and are content in staying under evil’s thumb and allow all of the nastiness to happen to others.

The turtles are living life in their new pad without a care in the world. Training day in and day out, they have a good thing going in the sewer but once again Raph has something to say about it. Killing their training music, Raph wants to be outside and roaming the streets and meeting people.  But Splinter will not allow this to happen since the world is not ready for walking and talking turtles and it may bring more enemies out of the wood work than they need to face.

April O’Neil comes to visit her boys and brings them some goodies from the flea market, but one item that she got for Splinter, she knows nothing about. When the scepter starts to light up, April is transported back to feudal Japan. Trying to figure out what happened to their friend, the turtles jump into action and Donatello is able to pinpoint how and when the scepter is activated.  With a new friend, Kenshin taking over April’s place in their time, the turtles decide to bring in Casey Jones to play babysitter in their absence. Expecting to arrive in a temple, the turtles are surprised to find themselves in the heat of a battle and without knowing who is fighting who, and who the good guys are, they escape the battle field, but Mikey is separated from the group and taken to a different camp.

With finding April being their primary responsibility, Raph, Donny and Leo check out the palace nearby and find that she is being held as a witch.  Being able to release her and a stranger named Whit that resembles their friend Casey, the group now turns their attention to finding their lost brother and the scepter. Being taken in by a rebel village, the turtles find out what is happening around them and try to adjust to their current time. Finding their brother but not the scepter, the turtle’s time is running out and they have little to no options for making it home.  But when the scepter is revealed to them and the true nature of Whit comes to the surface, the group is forced to make a decision that could leave them trapped in the past for the rest of their lives. You can never judge a book by its cover or a turtle by its spots when it comes to making the right decisions and with heavily armed forces coming to kill the off the village, the true nature of a hero comes bubbling to the top.

The third and final installment of the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles saga comes to a close with this movie and I wish it would have been different. This is the only movie that cannot stand the test of time with all of the jokes being very dated and if I was to show this to someone born in the nineties, they would not get any of them. With a completely different feel than the previous two movies, this one was trying to play off of the humor aspect more than anything and it seems like the story got lost in the mix.  Don’t get me wrong, there are several serious moments in this movie, but they were rivaled by the jokes that came out seconds later.  It showed promise with the storyline but fell short in the execution. I would have rather seen the turtles go back to medieval times myself, but hey, they did not ask me. Happy Viewing.

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