'Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles':Cowabungled, dude

HOLLYWOOD, an industry notoriously starved for ideas, has become very good at repurposing old junk.

Some of the brightest people in the business earn their money taking the rubbish of yesteryear, adding irony and wit, and coming up with something both nostalgia-driven and new.

If you can do it with "21 Jump Street," you can do it with anything.

Except maybe "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles."

This reboot feels less like an affectionate tribute to the '80s kiddie phenomenon than a low-grade version of some stale "Transformers" sequel, and lo and behold, it's produced by Michael Bay.

Bay has his purported strengths, but wit and irony are not among them. His company's idea of reanimating the TMNTs is to make them larger and more steroid-y, to film them in 3-D and to preserve with depressing literal-mindedness the tropes of the old show.

The Ninja Turtles like pizza.

They say "Cowabunga."

And then there's poor Megan Fox, briefly freed from the "Transformers" penitentiary, having fun with her image with Judd Apatow in "This is 40," now back in another Bay production, purely decorative again.

At least here she gets to kick someone decisively in the head. His name is Shredder, who wants to poison New York. The Turtles want to stop him.

Shredder is reputed to be a martial arts master, but clad in heavy Samurai armor, he's another of Bay's big metallic bores, a transformer by another name, and the movie's endless clanging, climax is another dullsville robot fight.