This Latest Spin on the Saturated TMNT Franchise Delivers true Comedic Turtle Power
DIRECTED BY JEFF ROWE/2023
In world that’s run out of patience and yet has surrendered to the glut of I.P. entertainment as the norm, one must take a minute to appreciate that the latest reboot of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles not only maintains that entire titular spiel, but tacks on a subtitle that repeats one of those four familiar words. (Hey, it doesn’t even matter to anyone that “I.P.” means “intellectual property;” we’re certainly not going to bother saying all that). It’s a hazy memory now, but way back in the pop-culturally starved world of the late ‘80s/early ‘90s, the heroes on a half-shell caused quite the amused ripple precisely because of its comedically unwieldy and zany title.
That it thoroughly exploded into the zeitgeist via a genuinely fun and colorful daily cartoon show (following its obscure small-press comic book roots- in black and white, no less) sealed the deal. Action figures. Video games. Bedsheets. Breakfast cereal. Kids shampoo. Costumes. Pizza tie-ins. Poorly made collector’s cases for the action figures. The “Coming Out of Their Shells” live music tour. And of course, theatrically released films. (Seven and counting). Leonardo, Donatello, Raphael, and Michelangelo were so pervasive that, moniker-wise, they overtook their namesakes. Some of the greatest artists in history got sidelined for anthropomorphic warrior reptiles who live in the sewer. It was great fun, but also just a moment in time. A fad. Or so we thought…
Cut to now. The Ninja Turtles, like everything else that has won a shred of zeitgeist attention in the past forty years, are not going away. The word combination that is “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” long ago stopped inspiring amusement and bewilderment. It’s so commonplace now that even the typing assist on my phone auto-prompts the correct next word. If anything, TMNT (as it’s also been known in subsequent years) has simply become part of the world’s wallpaper. Every possible take, from darkly mature to saccharine kiddie stuff, has emerged from the Turtle I.P. ooze. (Checks watch) Time for another movie!
The news on this reboot is surprisingly good: co-written by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, the animated Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem is the best, most fun TMNT film yet. I realize that that is a rather low bar- one that’s been scraped by the likes of both Michael Bay and Vanilla Ice. This, though, is a wildly fun time that harkens back to the very moment when the absurdity of the whole concept was overrun with forced coolness and marketing gone amok that resulted in a glut of embarrassing on-and-gone supporting characters. If you remember (however vaguely) the likes of Mondo Gecko, Genghis Frog, Leatherhead, Wingnut, and Ray Fillet (all here and voiced respectively by no less than Paul Rudd, Hannibal Buress, Rose Byrne, Natasia Demetriou, and Post Malone), Mutant Mayhem is especially for you.
All of those goofy characters (each of whom, I’m sure, is someone’s absolute most favorite of all time), plus the always beloved warmed-over-punk beasts of burden Bebop and Rocksteady (Seth Rogen and John Sena, a-growlin’ and a-snortin’), have been genetically engineered by the film’s villain, a tall human insect with the bombastic voice of Ice Cube called Superfly. Superfly and his horde of hoodlums are out to make everyone else into fellow mutants, and then rule over them. Or some such plot. the exact details of the big evil scheme aren’t as important as the fact that Superfly lures our heroes- the titular mutants themselves! – into his malicious clutches.
Oh, don’t worry- the Turtles don’t ever really go bad. They’re just receptive to Superfly’s rhetoric because A) their adoptive father, Splinter (Jackie Chan), raised them, ever hidden away in the sewer, to distrust all humans; and B) being teenagers, they really just want to fit in somewhere. While other versions of the Turtles have focused more on the “Ninja” aspect of the whole thing, this movie, despite having “Mutant” in the title twice and featuring a bunch of corny mutants, is the first incarnation to really double down on their “Teenage” wants. Simple things like going to high school, dating, or going to a movie without having to watch it from a roof on a drive-in screen several blocks away… these are our heroes’ main points of fascination. To the film’s credit, the four leads are voiced by actual teenagers (Micah Abbey, Shamon Brown Jr., Nicolas Cantu, and Brady Noon).
Early in the story, the boys accidentally meet April O’Neil (Ayo Edebiri), here reimagined as a camera-shy high school journalist. Quickly, she’s as determined to write a story on the Turtles as they are to exploit said story. The rationale goes that if she reports on them taking down the notorious Superfly, then everyone will love them and accept them and let them attend high school. Needless to say, there’s a little bit of a lesson waiting for all parties involved, but doggonit, it’s all so innocently relatable.
Anyhow, the plot barely matters. What matters is how absurdly funny this is. With Rogen and Goldberg in the core mix, it’s no wonder that Mutant Mayhem is first and foremost a comedy. And, a major unsung major reason why it’s so successful in that regard is due not only to its committed voice talent (Ayo Edebiri, Ice Cube, and Jackie Chan are particularly great), but the way the dialogue itself is managed. The characters speak with ordinary cadence and volume rather than the gratingly bombastic deliveries we get throughout most kids’ animation. Often times, the dialogue sounds almost Altman-esque, improvised and overlapping. This is a most, most welcome creative choice.
While Mutant Mayhem is the first major obvious Spider-Verse style imitator, the film is refreshingly not another multiverse movie. Yet, in the nicely honed silliness at work here, it’s easy to either connect or re-connect with the long-ago feeling of familiar tropes that warped into something so unexpectedly fresh as the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Mutant Mayhem won’t rescue the property from its own decades-running over-saturation, but it is a highly enjoyable romp into nostalgic Turtle power. And in this day and age who could ask for more?