Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie is an unwelcome renaissance, writes BRIAN VINER

This is the fifth live-action outing of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles on the big screen, some 20 years after the last.

Yet those strange, anthropomorphic turtles are still rather notorious in our house, as our older son always got into trouble for kicking things, including his brother and sister, after he’d emerged from watching them in the cinema.

He’s at university now, and has calmed down.

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The four turtles, by contrast, haven’t. Director Jonathan Liebesman gave us, whether we wanted it or not, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning, while producer Michael Bay is the man behind the Transformers films. 

That probably tells you all you need to know about this ‘reboot’ of the original Turtles franchise. It is exuberant, violent, cheerfully preposterous and very, very loud.

And weird. I forget why the turtles were named after great Renaissance artists —Michelangelo, Leonardo. 

Raphael and Donatello — but it’s really no weirder than anything else about them, such as their relentless and increasingly tiresome wise-cracking.

The token human hero, April (Megan Fox), though, is charmed, the more so when she realises that they were her childhood pets, kept in her scientist father’s laboratory until it burnt down, he was killed, and they mutated into humanoids. As I say, weird.

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