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Arrow’s Stephen Amell shows up as Casey Jones, the crime-fighting hockey aficionado. It’s nice to see Amell break out of Oliver Queen’s eternal brooding and have fun for a change. Megan Fox was the most engaging element in the last Turtles film, and she continues that distinction here. We only see her working at the beginning (undercover as a…schoolgirl?) and end (on-camera reporting) of the movie. For the rest of the running time she’s the Turtles’ right hand woman in their fight to bring down Shredder.

They do not hint that Baxter Stockman will become a human fly (Spoiler Alert: Baxter Stockman will become a human fly), but Bax is messing around with teleportation and this brings us Krang, Dimension X’s resident brain/tentacle creature, who gets around via giant robot and has a doomsday device called the Technodrome. Krang is voiced by Brad Garrett, who spits into his microphone so much I could feel the saliva.

Laura Linney shows up as a police chief, in what I can only call the John Turturro Transformers effect.

Not only an improvement over the last TMNT movie, Out of the Shadows is a better version of 1991’s Turtles opus The Secret of the Ooze. If Platinum Dunes produces a third in this series, I expect the Turtles to travel back in time. Is it too much to hope for an Elias Koteas cameo?