Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem and all the images you see in this review are owned by Paramount Pictures
Directed by Jeff Rowe
To be frank, I just never got the whole Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles thing. I like the original live-action movie well enough, but it’s not a franchise that I ever got invested in as it just felt like one of those Gen-X holdovers that overstayed its welcome. Well, now the joke’s on me as my childhood is now getting eye rolls from the Zoomers who also can’t escape the prevalence of their previous generation’s obsessions. It’s the circle of life I suppose, and TMNT is taking yet another stab at staying relevant to the youngsters. Will this be another hit for the franchise to go alongside Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, or will we be begging for the Bay-Turtles to come back by the time this is over? Let’s find out!!
In the beginning, there was ooze; and said ooze landed on a quartet of cute turtles as well as a very paternal rat. The ooze mutated them to be humanoid, but their ninja skills came from their adoptive rat-dad Splinter (Jackie Chan) looking for a way to protect his kids from the outside world. The turtles are now teenagers named Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael, and Donatello (Nicolas Cantu, Shamon Brown Jr, Brady Noon, and Micah Abbey) and while they can kick all sorts of butt with their ninja skills, they’re mostly used to get groceries and hide in the shadows; away from the scary humans who would surely reject them if they were to come out of the sewers. Sounds rather bleak if you ask me, but fortunately, they run into a high school reporter named April O’Neil (Ayo Edebiri) and she doesn’t immediately turn them in to the authorities to be dissected but instead comes up with a plan to make them heroes so that they can be accepted and go to high school, and she can get the scoop of a lifetime! Their mission is to take down the mysterious Super Fly (Ice Cube) whose been wreaking havoc all over the city with daring heists of top secret scientific hardware, and while the Turtles want nothing more than to live normal lives, getting closer to Super Fly also gets them closer to some very uncomfortable truths about themselves. What is this Super Fly after, and are his goals as evil as his means of achieving them? Is this a win-win scenario for all involved, or will the world never accept them even if they do save the day? Would we honestly be that shocked to learn of sentient turtles in the sewers who fight crime and eat pizza? I mean Congress had a hearing on UFOs and that barely lasted a day in the news cycle!
Across the Spider-Verse was a great movie that I still felt disappointed by given how high my expectations were, and while I wouldn’t say that this manages to outdo that film, it at least left me feeling satisfied and pleasantly surprised given how little I care for this particular franchise. It’s not exactly a game changer as we’re in something of a golden age for animated features, but it certainly has a lot more going for it than any other Turtles media I’ve seen. There’s a clear intent to make the turtles feel like genuine kids with what I can only assume is the youngest voice cast in the franchise’s history, and the personalities shine through these performances as well as the interesting looks they have here. They may not be as visually distinct as they were in Rise of the TMNT, but you shouldn’t have any issues telling them apart and following their individual arcs which is the film’s most endearing quality. Whether you’d consider this a departure from the franchise or not, for someone who’s only casually familiar with any of this I found it refreshing that they focus so much on the kid aspect and leave a lot of the high-concept ninja stuff as background noise; a means by which to tell the story rather than being the center of it. Perhaps if I was a fan I would find the lack of canon to be an annoyance; after all, the 2014 movie had almost nothing to do with the cartoons and felt like an utterly empty exercise for it. Still, the use of iconic characters and familiar plot points are not enough on their own to make a good movie, as the 2016 sequel showed, and what they’ve come up with here is interesting enough to stand on its own. This care doesn’t just extend to the Turtles, but to the rest of the supporting cast with April and Splinter coming off as much more flawed and human than from what I’ve seen before. Everyone’s been focusing on the changes to April, who is great in this, but it’s Splinter who ends up having the most radical change as he comes off as a bumbling worry wart rather than the stoic master of the Turtles; leaning into the dad side of his character in the same way that the Turtles are leaning into the kid aspect. The animation as well is fantastic and is comparable to the phenomenal Spider-Verse films, at least that’s what I thought when watching it and I’m sure animation buffs can more accurately compare the two. The stylish designs of everything and the charmingly rough edges to the animation almost give it a stop motion feel which for me only made it more entertaining to watch and just from my own point of view, I don’t think any other version has looked as good as this.
Despite everything that is so great about this movie, there are a few flaws to be found, and the most obvious of them center on the TCRI; the generic corporate bad guys of the TMNT universe. Their purpose in the movie is simply to drive the plot forward when needed and yet they don’t add any texture or nuance to the story. A late scene with them should have been the culminating moment of humanity’s inhumanity to the turtles, yet because of how fleeting their presence is the film has to end up hitting that note a second time just to drive the point home. The film also has a somewhat wonky third act that’s kicked off by the aforementioned TCRI scene, and we go through a lot of plot in a very little amount of time which makes it feel a little contrived. The big action finale and the closing moments of the movie do make up for most of this, but for a movie that manages to get so much right it’s a bit disappointing that it stumbles its way through the ending.
We’ve had nearly four decades of Turtles media to comb through, and while most of it has never clicked for me, there was always something there that resonated even in its worst entries. What we have here feels like the culmination of all that trial and error where what has always worked about the franchise is put front and center and the elements that have been holding it back are fearlessly discarded. The end result, at least for this non-Turtle fan, is one of the best animated films of the year and easily the best Turtles movie since the live-action film back in 1990. This gets an unequivocal recommendation from me, and I think that the Turtles fans out there will appreciate what it’s doing, even if we don’t get all characters and dynamics that we’ve come to expect. Shaking things up is how a franchise keeps from growing stale, and I have to hand it to the Turtles for their resilience and ability to stay relevant after all this time. Now the challenge will be if the same formula will work to revive a franchise no one has ever cared about! Come on, Seth Rogan! Let’s see what you can do with the Sewer Sharks!
The Reviewers Unite 