Metacritic-Rezensionen

The movie suffers from being the same shape as so many modern blockbusters, and the plot in the second half of the film is basically another riff on the “reach the glowing doodad on a roof to prevent the end of the world” structure. But the focus on the Turtles and the film’s overall amiable sense of goofball humor carries the day.

This sequel is a good improvement over the 2014 adventure that rebooted the franchise. The effects are better, the pacing is tighter and the overall impact is much more entertaining.

While it’s not necessarily a good thing to aim this kind of weaponized marketing at kids, it’s also silly and colorful enough to nearly work as a live-action cartoon. It might rot brains, but perhaps not while regarding them with utter contempt.

The film fares best when it slows down a bit and allows the Turtles' personalities, which are quite engaging, to shine through via their amusing comic banter.

Out of the Shadows’ barrels forward like such a rampaging beast that it decimates everything – plot, character, emotion, basic visual lucidity – in its wake.

Out of the Shadows stumbles from one set piece to the next, rarely offering viewers much reason to care in between, and its halfhearted attempts at moving toward the “dark and gritty” end of the comic-book spectrum never land.

Considerably better than its predecessor, the central four may give it their all but the people behind this franchise sadly don’t seem all that interested in their crime-fighting, pizza-eating heroes.

It’s still just a patience-testing bauble for anybody over the age of 12. The Turtles, in this latest incarnation, were and remain shiny but stupid entertainment for kids.

Visual spectacle still takes precedence over coherent plotting, and the human characters retain all the gravitas of generic placeholders who accidentally made it into the shooting script.

It’s soon clear that OOTS follows the model of Bay’s Transformers sequels. Longer, louder and boasting even more hardware, it does everything to generate the illusion of bleeding-edge bang-per-buck, while cribbing shamelessly from 1991’s Secret of the Ooze.