‘Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem’ review: Funny and vibrant, this animated flick is fun as shell
- Directed by Jeff Rowe of ‘The Mitchells vs. the Machines’, film embraces cartoonishness and focuses on themes like youthfulness and teenage alienation
- Jackie Chan voices Splinter, the stern mutant rat who raised the turtles, while Seth Rogan, who had a hand in writing the movie, offers his voice talents too
This image released by Paramount Pictures shows Michelangelo, Donatello, Leonardo and Raphael in a still from the new “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” film. Photo: Paramount Pictures via APAs box office analysts have noted with equal parts glee and alarm, it hasn’t been the hottest summer for the big film franchises. Fast X flailed. The Flash fizzled. The latest adventures of Indiana Jones and the Impossible Missions Force performed less stratospherically than expected. Meanwhile, the extraordinary commercial success and cultural staying power of Barbie and Oppenheimer have been greeted by many as a rare triumph for non-franchise-based storytelling, as well as a pointed referendum on Hollywood’s sequel/reboot overload: Give us originality, or give us depth!
Yet there are always exceptions, contradictions and assorted what-aboutisms: We can argue about how much Barbie, a smart, interesting movie that was made to sell toys and will surely mint a franchise of its own, qualifies as original. And this week sees the arrival of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem, an unexpectedly delightful challenge to the critic’s reflexive anti-franchise mentality.
Nimbly directed by Jeff Rowe (The Mitchells vs. the Machines) from a funny, perceptive script he wrote with Seth Rogen, Evan Goldberg, Dan Hernandez and Benji Samit, this rambunctious action-comedy gives nostalgia-stoking, action-figure-selling, comic-book-derived franchise relaunches a good name.
Mutant Mayhem joyously embraces its cartoonishness, if that’s the word for Rowe’s ripped-from-the-pages-of-a-kid’s-heavily-doodled-notebook aesthetic. There’s poetry in this imperfection: Unlike the artificially smoothed, computer-animated turtles of TMNT (2007) or their motion-captured equivalents in the Michael Bay-produced Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2014), these latest incarnations of Leonardo (voiced by Nicolas Cantu), Raphael (Brady Noon), Michelangelo (Shamon Brown Jr.) and Donatello (Micah Abbey) spring to gloriously sketchy, smudgy pop-art life from their first frame. And they lurk, leap and soar across a neon-streaked New York City that, for all its digital rendering, feels as fresh and handcrafted as a made-to-order Brooklyn pizza.
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Sustenance, pizza and otherwise, is of course never far from the turtles’ minds. Their first mission here – to fulfil a lengthy grocery list (and check off a product placement or two) – will require great stealth and cunning, since it’s important that they go unseen by human eyes. They are overgrown humanoid turtles, after all, thanks to a lab-engineered green ooze that contaminated their stretch of sewer 15 years earlier. They’re also teenagers, which only exacerbates their frustration at being lifelong outcasts. More than most Ninja Turtles stories, this one emphasises its foursome’s youthfulness, their merciless rib-rib banter, their pop-culture savvy (Michelangelo likes Beyoncé) and, above all, their eagerness to fit into a world that fears and rejects them on sight.
The film’s coming-of-age bent is unsurprising, given Rogen and Goldberg’s involvement. Mutant Mayhem has been wittily conceived as a comedy of alienation and assimilation. Splinter, the stern mutant rat who raised the turtles, trained them in martial arts and taught them that “humans are the demon scum of the earth,” is basically every overprotective immigrant father in rodent form. (It helps that he’s voiced with unadulterated Cantonese-dad energy by Jackie Chan).
The turtles’ individual gifts and personalities haven’t changed – Leo is still the responsible leader, Raph the courageous hothead, Mikey the lovable goofball and Donnie the brains of the outfit – but a longing for acceptance unites them all. It’s that longing that first plants the idea of superheroics in their bandana-wrapped heads, propelling them into an enjoyably nonsensical plot involving a shady scientific institute and a mutant-critter crime wave. As the turtles race around the city trying to save the day, they join forces with April O’Neil (Ayo Edebiri), a plucky high-school journalist who, in this telling, is almost as much of a misfit as they are.
That speaks to the warmly inclusive spirit of Mutant Mayhem, which, while not as exhilaratingly free-form as the recent Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, uses its visual style to suggest new worlds of representational possibility. And in ways that bring the X-Men series (among other properties) to mind, it turns the condition of mutantdom into an effective metaphor for the Other. If that insight verges on obvious by now, the movie nonetheless wears its politics lightly, rarely scoring points with an overworked speech when it can go with a light laugh, a kinetic car chase or a dynamically staged action scene instead.
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It’s telling that some of the story’s funniest, sweetest moments involve the turtles’ ostensible enemies. Initially disturbing but ultimately disarming, they’re a motley mutant menagerie voiced by actors including Rogen (warthog), Paul Rudd (gecko), Rose Byrne (alligator), Nastasia Demetriou (bat) and John Cena (black rhino). Their leader is the aptly named Superfly (a fearsome Ice Cube), who plays a key role in the movie’s climax – a wonderfully grotesque but coherently mapped-out sequence that tips its hat to Godzilla, David Cronenberg and, finally, the we’re-all-in-this-together spirit of New York itself.
Whether it cries out for a sequel is debatable. But I wouldn’t mind seeing if this latest cycle of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles turns out to be not just a reboot, but a renaissance.