Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem

I can report that the newest iteration of the Heroes on a Half-Shell, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem, is exactly what it needs to be, namely, fun. Since it seems we’ve all resigned ourselves to an entertainment future populated solely by established corporate franchise IP – as much as I loved Barbie, it does make me chuckle that it’s considered an original concept, even though it’s based on one of the most instantly recognizable bits of IP in American history – a fun time seems like the least that the Hollywood franchise machine can give us.

The fun contained in Mutant Mayhem is down to the actual creatives in the room. That’s a nice counterbalance to the nameless, faceless corporate execs whose deliberations, after looking at six previous TMNT films and four TV series, probably began and ended with the $100 million or so that a reboot of the series would likely generate for shareholders. (I threw up in my mouth a little bit just typing that.)

Hitting the reset button on the franchise this time is self-proclaimed perpetual teenager Seth Rogen, who produced Mutant Mayhem with his longtime creative partner, Evan Goldberg, as well as James Weaver. Rogen and Goldberg co-wrote the screenplay along with three others, including the film’s director, Jeff Rowe, who co-directed the 2021 animated hit The Mitchells vs. the Machines. Rogen also shows up in the computer-animated picture playing mutant warthog Bebop.

Our story begins in the makeshift home laboratory of Baxter Stockman, a scientist working for the Techno Cosmic Research Institute (TCRI). Stockman has gone rogue. He’s planning to use the mutagen he’s created – TMNT faithful will recognize this as the fateful ooze that transforms four average turtles, plus their father-figure, a rat named Splinter, into our pizza-loving heroes – to make a family of mutated animals. Stockman feels shunned by the world, and he wants comradery with creatures who will be as outcast as he is. TCRI executive Cynthia Utrom dispatches an assault team to neutralize Stockman and retrieve his mutagen to use for the company’s own nefarious purposes.

The raid doesn’t go as planned. The assault team dispatches Stockman, but in the process, his ooze is lost down the sewers of New York City, along with the test tubes containing his mutant experiments, among them a housefly, a warthog, and a rhinoceros. Utrom instructs her soldiers to collect all of Stockman’s research, so TCRI can go about back-engineering Stockman’s work.

Fifteen years later, we meet Donatello, Michelangelo, Leonardo, and Raphael, the turtles who Splinter rescued from the ooze, but not before becoming contaminated himself. Splinter has raised the turtles to be distrustful of all humans because of how they treated him – you know, because he’s a rat – before he took refuge in the sewers.

The turtles hide from their overprotective father the fact that they long to be part of the human world. They want to attend high school and be accepted by their human counterparts. A sewer can be a lonely place for a sentient humanoid mutant turtle.

The two standout elements of Mutant Mayhem are its computer animation and the free flowing, improv feel of the stellar cast. At times, especially when the mise-en-scène includes any sort of text on computer screens, I wondered if rotoscoping was involved. That’s because the animation style can best be described as a sort of heightened or hallucinatory realism. The characters’ motion and physicality have a weight behind them. You know you’re looking at animation, but, at the same time, it feels like that animation is a fantastical layer placed right on top of the real world.

That makes the action movie stunts (for lack of a better term) sing on the screen, because they feel rooted in reality. It creates a cognitive dissonance, due to the wildly fantastical circumstances of the action. The sight of a giant, mutated housefly – the turtles proximate villain calls himself Superfly and is obsessed with flipping society upside down so that mutants rule over humans – lifting an armored truck into the sky and flying away with it is unsettlingly realistic.

There is also an inspired sequence early in the film that mixes live action and animation. Because Splinter forbids regular interaction with humans, the turtles take advantage of trips for groceries to push on their dad’s boundaries. On one of these trips, the quartet lurks, unnoticed, at the edges of an outdoor summer movie screening of Ferris Bueller's Day Off. Any time we see the movie screen, it shows us the actual, live action footage of the 1986 John Hughes teen comedy, while the rest of the world remains animated.

Teen comedies were an inspiration for Rogen & Co. on Mutant Mayhem and their movie leans into the feeling of teen angst and alienation. It’s heightened by the fact that the characters experiencing that angst and alienation are, you know, sentient humanoid mutant turtles.

This is the first time, at least to my knowledge, that the four titular characters have been voiced by actual teenagers, lending another degree of authenticity. The quartet range in age from fifteen to nineteen years old. The youngest of them, fifteen-year-old Micah Abbey, embodies Donatello with a voice that often cracks due to the cruelties of the onset of male puberty, especially when the character is excited, which is often. Abbey’s performance, as is the case with the rest of the turtles, is incredibly endearing.

For this reboot of the TMNT mythos, the filmmakers have retconned the character of April O'Neil, the turtles’ one human ally, from a grown-up journalist into a teenage aspiring journalist. One of the funniest bits of the movie comes in April’s own origin story in which she relates to her new friends the excruciatingly embarrassing tale of why she wants to stay off-camera in her journalistic pursuits – spoiler alert, it involves a lot of vomit.

April is voiced by the talented Ayo Edebiri – whom I discovered earlier this year at SXSW in writer/director Emma Seligman’s hilarious teen sex comedy Bottoms – and her simultaneous incredulity at and eventual affection for the reptilian ninja masters is heartwarming. The design for O’Neil cleverly jettisons the character’s yellow jumpsuit of the original animated TV series, but pays homage to it with the new iteration’s yellow jacket, which is omnipresent. Credit is also due to the animation team for making April look like a real human being, as opposed to the Barbie-like physique of the original TV show.

Stealing the movie each time he appears is Ice Cube as mutant bad guy Superfly. I’m in no way an Ice Cube cinematic completist, but this might be Cube’s funniest performance since the original Friday. The iconic rapper pays tribute to another legend, Ice-T, when he quotes the titular line to Ice-T’s genre-defining track 6 in the Mornin'.

There are a slew of cameo appearances within Mutant Mayhem. The field gets a little crowded, causing the stunt casting to lose some of its impact. It’s because there’s so much going on in each action sequence and there are so many characters vying for attention that it’s easy for some of them to get lost in the shuffle. The standout of these cameos is Paul Rudd as the goofy Mondo Gecko, a mutant gecko who embodies a skater-dude ethos. Seth Rogen’s bestie Rose Byrne also turns up as mutant alligator Leatherhead.

The most endearing performance of the movie probably belongs to Hong Kong martial arts film icon Jackie Chan as Splinter. Convincing the turtles to shun humans because of how he himself was treated by them, Chan’s Splinter is overprotective to a fault, but with good reason. He’s a doting parent who wants to protect his kids at any cost.

Chan’s casting as Splinter is an interesting twist in the ongoing saga of the character. There’s no denying that the two white guys who created the original concept for TMNT were practicing some cultural appropriation when they made the turtles’ father figure a Japanese ninjitsu sensei – in their defense, Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird, the creators, were using Splinter in their comic book to parody Marvel character Daredevil’s sensei, Stick.

Going back as far as the very first TMNT movie, Splinter was a rat who mastered martial arts from his human owner, a Japanese martial artist named Hamato Yoshi. Within Mutant Mayhem, Splinter is an ordinary American rat living in New York City when he has his run in with the ooze that will transform him and his new family. It’s strange to me that Rogen and his producing partners decided to cast in the role a man with Chinese heritage. All that notwithstanding, Jackie Chan is a treasure, and his performance as Splinter gives the character (and the movie as a whole) an emotional hook it would have otherwise been lacking.

I was eight or nine when Donatello, Michelangelo, Leonardo, and Raphael exploded into my cultural awareness. Like Seth Rogen, I’m in the right age range to be excited about any TMNT stories that come along. Still, I let out a sigh of resignation when a mid-credits sequence appeared during Mutant Mayhem to tease the next movie in the franchise.

(Apologies for spoiling that, but, come on, am I really spoiling anything? There was little to no doubt in my mind that Mutant Mayhem would be launching a new series.)

The groan of frustration that escaped me was with the MCU-ification of, well, everything. It’s not entirely fair to solely blame Marvel for the phenomenon. TMNT is only one example of a media franchise that’s damn-near as old as I am. If the next movie in the series is as fun and enjoyable as Mutant Mayhem, I’ll be delighted.

Why it got 3.5 stars:
- Mutant Mayhem is a good time. The story is nothing to write home about, but the animation is dazzling and, crucially, the movie is a lot of fun.

Things I forgot to mention in my review, because, well, I'm the Forgetful Film Critic:
- I love that Splinter is a fan of Cool Ranch Doritos (even though that means I essentially had to sit through an ad for Doritos; I felt similarly about the Pizza Hut logo that was included in one scene as the turtles prepared to chow down).
- One of the action sequences feels like an homage to the iconic heist movie Heat.
- Thank you to all the people — from the person who had the idea to the people who had to work on the contract — for including Vanilla Ice’s Ninja Rap, his wonderfully terrible contribution to the turtleverse, in a montage sequence.
- The reference to The Hulk in Endgame that one of the turtles makes caused me to literally LOL.
- One fight sequence in Mutant Mayhem is evocative of the side-scrolling video games of the early 90s, a few of which featured the TMNT.
- I will forever love the fact that Rogen — there’s no question in my mind that this was his idea — was able to slip an ODB song, Shimmy Shimmy Ya, one of the filthiest songs ever recorded, into his PG movie.

Close encounters with people in movie theaters:
- I saw this at Alamo Cedars with Rae. It was actually her idea. I was thoroughly unexcited to see it. I’m glad I listened to my wife (which is the case more often than not). Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem is currently available exclusively in theaters.

1 Comment