Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze Movie Review

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze  (1991)

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Written by: Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird (based on characters created by), Todd W. Langen (written by)
Directed by: Michael Pressman
Starring: Paige Turco, Michelan Sisti, Leif Tilden, Kenn Scott, Mark Caso, Kevin Clash, Ernie Reyes Jr., François Chau, Mark Ginther, Kurt Bryant, Kevin Nash
Rated: PG
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Plot
The Ninja Turtles and Shredder battle once again for the last canister of the ooze that created the Turtles.

Verdict
It's an easy watch and fun for the whole family. The story is perfunctory. This movie is one big commercial and the plot, characters, and movie suffer for it. The violence is toned down despite them being fighting turtles. For a kid this would be a lot of fun, as an adult you see everything wrong with it.
It depends.

Review
The sequel was much more light hearted than the first, and the turtles rarely used weapons as compared to the first to tone down the violence. The point of this movie was merchandising.

I hadn't seen the first or second Ninja Turtles movie since I was a kid, but I remember liking the first one more. I assume that opinion still holds true after watching the second one. The sequel was toned down across the board to make this more kid friendly.

The character of Keno was created to replace the too violent for kids Casey Jones from the first movie.

In the opening montage, everyone is eating pizza. Who knows why. Sure pizza is good, maybe this is satire of the usual opening city scenes. Maybe it's to drive home how much the turtles like pizza and you should eat it to support them.

Pizza delivery boy Kino sees something suspicious and investigates, but really what criminal would be that obvious by leaving two vans with all the doors open and stolen goods next to them? How would twenty guys fit in two vans?

 

When crime is involved the world's worst kept secret springs into acting, Ninja Turtles. There are a lot of quips and puns and that happen throughout the movie. It's not far from being nonsense dialog for the turtles to fill space during the movie. The turtles only speak in quips.
There are no weapons as the turtles dispatch dozens of bad guys in the opening scene. There are combat cold cuts.

The timeline is strange. It seems the turtles have been living with April for six months to a year. When we see the Foot they act like Shredder was killed yesterday. Shredder's fist rises through garbage, but his facial scars are fully healed. If he was crushed by a garbage truck facial scars should be the least of his worries. He then appears at the Foot hideout as they are planning what to do with Shredder gone. I can only imagine a lot of footage was shot and this was the best that could be pieced together.

Chemical waste is the plot's focus. We get a scientist cleaning up waste and his company's image. The scientist seems poised to be a villain, but he's not. Originally this scientist was going to be an alien in disguise as in the comics the turtles were transformed by ooze with alien origins.

Shredder want's the ooze for revenge. He's going to create his own mutants. Shredder oozes up a wolf and snapping turtle. The Ninja Turtle creators wouldn't allow the use of BeBop or Rocksteady from the comics.

The Foot are recruiting. It seems they used flyers and commercials about their big criminal meetup as they have a great turnout. Everyone knows about the tryouts except the police. The cops don't exist in this movie.
Raphael and Keno attempt to infiltrate the Foot. More than once Keno walks five feet away from the group to talk to Raphael and no one notices a six foot tall turtle. I don't know how.

In a touching scene Tokka and Razor fully mutate and are stupid babies. They call Shredder "mama," and Shredder is unhappy.

The turtles are lured into a trap that's "a little too Raph." The fight spills into a club where Vanilla Ice is performing On the fly, and this may be the penultimate moment of the movie, Ice crafts a rhyme about the ninja turtles, "go ninja go ninja go."

There are a lot of bits in this movie. Many times the action or narrative stops for a joke or quip with characters that only appear in that scene. The club owner wants the cops called due to monsters on the dance floor. Once the cops are on the phone, he's incredulous the cops were called because the club loves the monsters.

Shredder ingests ooze and transforms in seconds despite it taking Tokka and Razor a few hours. Shredder is huge and I'm primed for a final fight between him and the turtles. Shredder is under a dock with the turtles and smashes the columns with his fists, collapsing the dock as  he's crushed and the turtles jump off. It seemed like he was after the turtles but what he does makes no sense. Did the ooze make him an idiot? What was the plan? To crush himself and them? The turtles exclaim they love being turtles but all they did was jump off a dock and anything, human or animal, could have done that. Shredder could have done that! It's such an unfulfilling ending. They don't even fight!

This isn't a bad movie. It's far from good, but I enjoyed it as a kid. It's fun, with simple jokes, but pretty shallow. That's lack of depth is more noticeable as an adult, but even as a kid I remember liking the first one better. It's a bit darker, more developed. This movie is a romp to sell toys.