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

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.