Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is a phenomenon that has been quietly blowing me away since the late 1980s when I discovered the original cartoon at the impressionable young age of seven (or thereabouts) and became a massive fan almost at first glance. Like those famous Marvel and DC superheroes before them, the Turtles have managed to transcend their humble comic book origins to become an entertainment juggernaut that have caught the imagination of now generations of kids and even some adults along the way. All the more so because unlike the massive success of, say, those early Superman or Captain America comics, the Turtles started life as a truly independent, self-published, black-and-white comic book that were written and drawn mostly as a parody of Frank Miller's gritty, neo-noir takes on Daredevil and Batman.

And here we are, most of four decades later, with the seventh (?) big screen outing for our heroes in a half shell (following countless TV series, comics, video games and all sorts of moichendise) and if Mutant Mayhem doesn't win over yet another generation of fans, it can only be because their parents didn't take them to see it. No Turtles film will ever replace the first movie in my heart, and I will always flag up the TV movie Turtles Forever, which actually did a small-scale version of the whole multiverse thing a decade before Spider-Verse, the Flash and Dr Strange 2, but Mutant Mayhem is almost definitely the best Turtles film to date.

This despite some changes to the lore - in particular, the minimizing of the "N" part of TMNT - that I'm, at best, ambivalent about.

There's just so much here that works that it's easy to overlook my own personal biases. Certainly, after the trainwreck that was the Michael-Bay-produced live action films and the middling TMNT, Mutant Mayhem is an especially welcome breath of fresh air. 

First, just to get the supremely obvious out of the way first, it looks freaking incredible. Clearly taking a page from the Spider-Verse movies, but without outright aping them, the animation and art design are things of beauty. Though, fitting a TMNT film, scruffy, noir-ish, freaky and gooey things of beauty. Like Spider-verse, it really does evoke the comics better than any other film adaptation to date, while giving it a unique visual twist that you can only really accomplish with animation. And after the horror show of Bay's "live-action" abominations, it's also particularly pleasing to see such classic, cool-looking character designs for the Turtles themselves.

And speaking of the Turtles themselves, beyond the visuals, what really makes the film work is the winning portrayals of our four teenage, mutant heroes. The decision to cast actual teenagers as the Turtles was a stroke of genius - it's really amazing they never thought to do that before - and perhaps even better that they're relative unknowns (there are plenty of "big names" in the cast, but they're mostly relegated to playing other mutant characters), but let's not overlook how well written they are, as each has their trademark personality fully intact without ever feeling just like stock character archetypes.

I'm somewhat more ambivalent about the portrayals of Splinter (Jackie Chan!) and April (Ayo Edebiri), but I'm not going to pretend that a large part of that doesn't come from bias based on 35 years of mostly consistent portrayals. 

The plot itself is... fine, if a little bit X-Men-esque, but it has a solid message, a really fun bad guy (technically a new character but not really; voiced by Ice Cube) and it goes utterly nuts towards the end in a way that only really works in animation. The humour seems to be a bit of a point of contention, but I always preferred my Turtles with a sense of humour and Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg (who co-wrote the script with Jeff Rowe, who, in turn, co-directed the film with Kyler Spears) do a nice job converting their more "adult" comedy into something more palatable for younger audiences. And arguably for older audiences too.

Admittedly, Mutant Mayhem is nowhere near as good as the Spider-Verse films as it lacks both the depth and surprisingly tight plotting of those films, but it's a really, really good Ninja Turtles movie and further proof that those Spider-verse films were a much-needed shot in the arm for mainstream Hollywood animation.

If only other studios were quicker to keep up...

8/10