Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem … | Little White Lies

Teenage Mutant Nin­ja Tur­tles: Mutant May­hem review – Tur­tle Pow­er is alive and well

31 Jul 2023

Assorted action figures of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, featuring vibrant green, blue, and orange colours.
Assorted action figures of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, featuring vibrant green, blue, and orange colours.
3

Anticipation.

Looks charming, but the Ninja Turtles have had a lot of false starts on film.

4

Enjoyment.

An energetic, hilarious reinvention of everyone’s favourite anthropomorphic, pizza-devouring, chelonian martial artists.

4

In Retrospect.

Turtle power is alive and well.

The piz­za-lov­ing, wise­crack­ing anthro­po­mor­phic rep­tiles receive a sub­stan­tial facelift in this charm­ing ani­mat­ed out­ing, which embraces their ado­les­cent spirit.

After near­ly 40 years of iter­a­tion, per­haps the most imme­di­ate­ly strik­ing thing about Teenage Mutant Nin­ja Tur­tles: Mutant May­hem is how gan­g­ly the Nin­ja Tur­tles now look. Under the direc­tion of Jeff Rowe (co-writer and co-direc­tor on The Mitchells vs the Machines), they look com­pelling­ly awk­ward and ado­les­cent, each giv­en a unique phys­i­cal stature. Such expres­siv­i­ty and inten­tion­al rough­ness car­ries through to the rest of the film’s cap­ti­vat­ing and expres­sive design, its grimy, lumi­nes­cent vision of New York rooftops (which recalls the 90s live-action film in some ways), alleys and under­grounds built from lop­sided lines, the VFX and light­ing illu­mi­nat­ing its strange nightlife tex­tured with pen­cil scribbles.

If films like Into the Spi­der-Verse feel ripped from a com­ic book, the vivid­ly imag­ined Mutant May­hem feels ripped from the mar­gins of a teenager’s note­book (I half-expect­ed the Cool S” to appear onscreen). Add in a thun­der­ing elec­tron­ic score from Trent Reznor and Atti­cus Ross and it’s all a beau­ti­ful­ly tex­tured reflec­tion of these char­ac­ters’ com­ing-of-age, spir­it­ed but unsure of their place a world that’s frankly pret­ty terrifying.

Remix­ing a num­ber of clas­sic TMNT beats, the Mutant May­hem of the title begins when the Nin­ja Tur­tles and their mutant cousins” dis­agree on the best route to a peace­ful life on Earth (an echo of one of their com­ic book inspi­ra­tions, the X‑Men). The lat­ter think the best solu­tion to their inabil­i­ty to live among peo­ple is to sim­ply kill them all. That mis­sion is led by the mas­sive, mis­an­throp­ic Super­fly, voiced by Ice Cube with hilar­i­ous forth­right­ness: he’s tired of hid­ing. The Nin­ja Tur­tles’ father, a bum­bling and para­noid take on anthro­po­mor­phic rat Mas­ter Splin­ter (Jack­ie Chan!) believes cohab­i­ta­tion impos­si­ble, and keeps his adopt­ed rep­til­ian chil­dren hid­den away in the sew­ers, from fear of humanity’s vio­lence towards that which is dif­fer­ent. The boys seek a third route with the help of junior reporter April O’Neil (Ayo Ede­biri), hop­ing to pave their way to social accep­tance by becom­ing heroes for a city that very well may hate and fear them.

That sep­a­ra­tion between the Nin­ja Tur­tles and the human world has long played into their sto­ries but Rowe and the writ­ers breathe new life into that idea, a direc­tion which helps fend off the IP wari­ness: as great as Bar­bie is, we got a toy movie just a cou­ple of weeks ago, and the TMNT are as about as toyet­ic as car­toon fran­chis­es come. But the win­some per­son­al­i­ties of the Nin­ja Tur­tles give it sin­cer­i­ty, thanks in no small part to its teenage voice cast, and Rowe’s embrace of chaot­ic crosstalk in the film’s voice direction.

Their voice per­for­mances lend the sto­ry authen­tic­i­ty even at its most ridicu­lous, while con­stant­ly threat­en­ing to derail scenes into excitable or mock­ing chat­ter, and it’s an adorable delight when­ev­er it does. That messi­ness in their con­ver­sa­tions extends to the film’s thrilling and fun­ny action sequences, mix­ing it up between slap­dash impro­vi­sa­tion and the flu­id­i­ty of a sea­soned mar­tial artist. One stand­out sequence exem­pli­fies the lat­ter by stitch­ing togeth­er four dif­fer­ent fights togeth­er into one dance, each of the broth­ers’ move­ments flow­ing into the next, all with Backstreet’s No Dig­gi­ty” croon­ing in the back­ground, one of many choice 90s nee­dle drops (per­son­al favourites being M.O.P.’s Ante Up” and De La Soul’s Eye Know”).

Such nee­dle drops are one way the film itself embraces the boys’ mag­pie-like atti­tude towards pop cul­ture, com­bin­ing it’s nods to TMNT’s past with a hoard of ref­er­ences to every­thing from Fast and the Furi­ous: Tokyo Drift and Fer­ris Bueller’s Day Off, Jujut­su Kaisen and Attack on Titan, to BTS and Bey­on­cé. It’s some­times over­whelm­ing, but not point­less, used to build an impres­sion of how these char­ac­ters con­nect to a world they are most­ly shut out of (as is TMNT tra­di­tion). But Mutant May­hem also recog­nis­es that this pop cul­tur­al ephemera can act as a way to find your peo­ple and a sense of belong­ing. As well as the coloured masks, the Nin­ja Tur­tles are also defined by the dif­fer­ent social cliques they might belong to, like ani­mé geeks, jocks, do-good­er stu­dent jour­nal­ists and the­atre kids. In a sto­ry that’s express­ly about their inse­cu­ri­ty over being inhu­man, it’s the most human (and the most teenage) they’ve ever felt.

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