"Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem" is Nostalgic and Original
The Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg-produced resurrection of age-old IP infuses Gen Z culture with 1990s nostalgia.
Much has been made about the similarities between the recently released Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem, a hyper-stylized animation about mutant teenagers discovering the true meaning of heroism, and the Spider-Verse movies, hyper-stylized animations about mutant teenagers discovering the true meaning of heroism. I’m admittedly making an unfair comparison—stories about ninjutsu-trained humanoid tortoises are not the same as those about high schoolers and radioactive spiders. But at the same time, when one richly-textured animated movie begets another, it’s hard not to notice. In an animation ecosystem defined by studios like Pixar and Illumination, whose sterile, ageless approach to CGI animation has quickly become the industry standard—the hand-drawn vibrancy of Mutant Mayhem inevitably stands out.
To its credit, Mutant Mayhem’s visuals are not Spider-Verse derivative, even if they do pulsate along a similar frequency. Unlike the Spider-Verse movies, which flitted epileptically between an endless supply of comic book stylings, Mutant Mayhem is grounded in a singular vision: a dusty, ripped-from-the-pages aesthetic, plucked directly out of a teenager’s unkempt sketchbook. The turtles themselves are rendered with a similarly greasy amateurism—the perfect palette for pizza-loving teenagers who happen to have shells on their backs. For the first time in the turtles’ three-decade history on the big screen—having been campy live-action puppets in the early 90s, flat-faced CGI globs in the mid-2000s, and whatever the fuck the Michael Bay-produced 2014 reboot was—Mutant Mayhem does something unforeseen, making these teenaged turtles feel like actual teenagers. And as it turns out, the solution was a simple one: use the voices of actual teenagers. Nicholas Cantu, Brady Noon, Shamon Brown Jr., and Micah Abbey give charm to the roles of Leonardo, Raphael, Michaelangelo, and Donatello, respectively.
Unlike many superhero-adjacent IP resurrections of its ilk, Mutant Mayhem is possessed less by world-ending villainy (or at least not initially) than with a boyish desire for acceptance. The first moment we meet the turtles, we witness four immature brothers doing a grocery run for their father, poking fun at each other when they try to hype each other up. (“OK, Batman,” says Raphael when Leonardo tries to inspire his brothers with a hilariously overdramatic Dark Knight-esque monologue.) These are turtles living in an underground sewer, after all, raised by a sewer rat father named Splinter (voiced by Jackie Chan) who, out of his own traumatic history with humans, has instilled in them a mantra beginning with “Humans are the demon scum of the Earth” and ending with “to interact with them is to die!” The narrative trajectory of adventurous kids and their overprotective father is here laid bare, and Mutant Mayhem carries off the simplicity of that tale with a genuine interest in its protagonists’ teenaged emotions.
Because, again: the turtles are voiced by actual teenagers! The film’s script (by Seth Rogen, Evan Goldberg, Jeff Rowe, Dan Hernandez, and Benji Samit) is steeped in references to Drake, Avengers movies, and Attack on Titan—exactly the kinds of nerdy, up-to-date obsessions that Gen Z narratives like these tend to lack. Mutant Mayhem’s action sequences—animated with hugely entertaining kineticism, and given pumping excitement by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’ synthesized musical score—are infused with a similar juvenility. In their first fight against a biker gang, the turtles stumble into each other, struggle with their own authority, and scream with piercingly undeveloped male voices. There’s a pure-hearted innocence to these sequences, one that Rogen and Goldberg—the originators behind this particular turtle reboot—have an evident interest in bringing to present generations.
It’s an interesting paradox of the film, then, that Mutant Mayhem’s commitment to present generations is offset by a nostalgia for the past. Guided by the tutelage of Rogen and Goldberg and sure-handedly directed by Jeff Rowe, Mutant Mayhem has a soundtrack comprised primarily of Golden Age hip-hop beats (De La Soul, Ol’ Dirty Bastard, and A Tribe Called Quest fill up the film’s best setpieces), while its voice cast is plucked almost entirely from the Rogen-Goldberg comedy troupe of the mid-2000s. Maya Rudolph, Rose Byrne, Hannibal Burress, and Paul Rudd all show up as friend-or-foe mutant gang members; Rogen himself appears to voice a violent mutant warthog—all voices that found prominence in Rogen-Goldberg classics like Superbad and Neighbors. Even non-canon performers like Jackie Chan (brilliant in the role of Splinter) and Ice Cube (playing Superfly, a supervillain not irrelevantly named after the 1972 blaxploitation thriller) are defined by their penchant for the past: You can' see how dweebs like Rogen and Goldberg might be thrilled at the chance to resurrect martial arts and N.W.A. heroes.
This kind of self-interested nostalgia can be dangerous territory for a movie dedicated to people born after the year 2000, but Mutant Mayhem’s music cues and casting choices never feel like pandering to the parents. Chan and Ice Cube genuinely inspired casting choices; both find shades of vulnerability inside their larger-than-life public personas. The 90s hip-hop soundtrack is similarly well-suited to the film’s vision of New York: when the turtles first emerge from the sewers, wide-eyed at the potential of this glittering city, there’s a feeling of history—that this town has been around since before Q-Tip and Phife Dawg first set out to conquer it. It’s wonderful that this story of teenaged turtles can be as interested in BTS as it is in Tribe, giving the film a beautiful continuum between the past and the present.
Mutant Mayhem’s synthesis of character and aesthetics is excpetional, so much so that it often masks a cookie-cutter script that is duller than it should be. The scenes between bickering turtle brothers crackle with classic Rogen-Goldberg magic, yes, but much of the rest of the film is filled with impromptu flashbacks and out-of-nowhere monologues: exposition-heavy nonsense that pops in jarringly to push the narrative towards its conclusion. In one scene, the turtle brothers remark that they’ve heard Splinter tell their origin story a million times before. Five seconds later, Splinter recounts an origin story as though nobody has ever heard it before—a shameful piece of writing that undercuts the beautiful animation upholding it. This kind of shoehorned writing has dogged the Rogen-Goldberg team since the days of Pineapple Express, but it stands out far more in a family-friendly coming-of-age story than in a gross-out comedy about weed dealers and hitmen, where such incoherence is altogether ignorable.
But these are forgivable sins. In a post-Spider-Verse world, where IP resurrections are often a frustrating exercise in zombified repetition, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem manages to infuse artistic originality with a surprisingly gentle love for the past. The film barrels pleasantly towards a conclusion that reinforces themes of childhood exploration and helicopter parenting, tying together all its loose ends into a satisfying bow. The final sequence is a particular standout, with a barnstorming Kaiju setpiece that recalls the rallying New Yorkers that came together at the end of Sam Raimi’s original Spider-Man. (It is also in this sequence that April O’Neil, voiced by an underutilized Ayo Edibiri, gets what is perhaps the funniest joke in the film—a vomit-fest that plays towards the gross-out comedy classics of Rogen-Goldberg yore.) Each moment is possessed with a sense of care for the characters onscreen—a feature often missing from reboots such as these.