After years of being sheltered from the human world, the Turtle brothers set out to win the hearts of New Yorkers and be accepted as normal teenagers through heroic acts. Their new friend April O'N...
Yet another franchise I’m familiar with but don’t really care about, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is getting rebooted into yet another movie: “Mutant Mayhem”……and I decided to let my curiosity get the best of me and prepare myself for my first official early access screening since Knives Out.
The experience was about what I expected: purely passable.
I find that some of the Ninja Turtle stories work better when it embraces the absurdity of its own world-building and that’s one thing I can give Jeff Rowe props for despite how narratively straightforward the story is. His direction combines the darker tone of the original live action movies and the giddy spirit of the cartoon in a manner that compliments both styles and make it feel natural.
All the stellar voice performances give way to a spirited personality that makes each character stand out enough in their own way. Having actual teens portray the actual Turtles was a smart play and Jackie Chan was a delight to the ears but it’s Ayo Edebiri and Ice Cube who constantly steal the show.
Extremely basic but effective cinematography and editing skills are aplenty here cooped alongside a very cheeky but earnest tone, it’s plethora of settings are are equally colorful and imaginative despite the limited production design, the lighting has a lot of attention to detail and based on how the film looks, it only further proves Ninja Turtles work better in animation than live action: the Spiderverse comic book-esque aesthetic carries on strong with this one but this time, through stubby notebook scratches, scribbled brushstrokes and a plastic tactility that does keep the presentation enlivening a little bit without having to directly rip off the aesthetic from other films.
Between the action sequences, attempts at humor that are played extremely safe and the moody electronic score from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, however, there isn’t exactly a whole lot I can say about each other individually. They all achieve the lofty heights of ‘FINE’.
Some of the comedy works when they’re poking fun about the TMNT lore but the rest are mostly pop-culture references.
I had no doubts about how this story was going to play out; look, I’m aware this is meant for kids so all of the exposition is extremely on the nose and the effort is front and center for all to see. Seth Rogan and Evan Goldberg have made a habit out of making coming-of-age stories since Superbad so doing that with the Ninja Turtles is a gamble that I think paid off the best it could’ve done. What I’m saying is it could’ve been a tad bit better because putting to one side the predictability of it all, doing another take on ‘bad guy builds weapon to take over the world, good guys must stop him’, what we get here is…..rather substandard, honestly. In stark contrast to Rowe’s previous smash hit, Mitchells Vs. Machines, how small scale the plot and adventure ultimately feel kept coming back to me; the conflict ends almost as quickly as it begins despite all the commotion surrounding it and despite another dutiful retelling of the Turtles’ origin, the way the plotline plays out is just dull and contrived.
Maybe this is just me but in comparison to Spiderverse, Puss In Boots and, again, Mitchells Vs. Machines, this films fast pacing and insistence on, well, mayhem is also something I’m not willing to give into so easily here because somehow, it actually hinders whatever progress the film tries to build up to. As ass-backwards as this might sound, it uses its own hyperactive nature as a crutch to distract us from what little actually happens in the grand scheme of the story, especially since most of the characters besides the Turtles, April or Splinter go through little subsequent character growth and come off as dull. Considering it’s REALLY hard to find a fresh take on this property without going out of bounds, the character moments barely have more weight over the actual story itself but even that gets drowned out by the plainness of it all.
Especially during the final act where everything moves so quickly that the fights can sometimes veer on incoherent and I can hardly bring myself to care about what happens next even when I already know how this ends.
At the end of the day, this might as well be a sketchy afterthought to me; it captures the look, aesthetic and feel of a Spiderverse movie and is certain to reignite some fans interests in the Ninja Turtles. It’s better than recent TMNT outings but the story is so basic and so by-the-numbers compared to other animated films who’ve used that Spiderverse style, it might as well be considered coloring outside the lines…..and that isn’t good enough.
