Jeff Rowe’s animated reboot treats the turtles as what they have always been called and never been: teenagers. It is funny, drawn as if scribbled in a school jotter, and it runs on a plot you could recite in advance. We recommend it.
The word has sat at the front of the title for nearly forty years and nobody making these films has paid it much attention. Jeff Rowe’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem does. Its four heroes are voiced by teenagers, talk like teenagers, and spend their nights on rooftops staring at a high school they are not allowed to attend. It is funny, it is drawn as though someone doodled it in the back of a maths book, and it is the best film these characters have had. We recommend it, with the caveat that the plot arrives pre-assembled.
Splinter (Jackie Chan) found the turtles as babies in the sewer and brought them up on one rule: humans are to be avoided. Leonardo (Nicolas Cantu), Raphael (Brady Noon), Donatello (Micah Abbey) and Michelangelo (Shamon Brown Jr.) obey it about as well as any teenager obeys anything. They meet April O’Neil (Ayo Edebiri), a school reporter, and decide that if they catch the gang she is chasing the city will have to love them. Cynthia Utrom (Maya Rudolph) runs a company that wants mutants for its laboratories, and Baxter Stockman (Giancarlo Esposito) is the scientist who made the ooze that made everyone.
Yashar Kassai’s production design is the reason to go. New York is drawn in smudged neon and pencil shading, the lines do not quite meet at the corners, and the turtles are four different shapes rather than one shape in four colours: Donatello lanky and stooped, Michelangelo small and never still. Shadows look rubbed in with a thumb. It owes an obvious debt to Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse and is scruffier and less pleased with itself. There is a night-time car chase, early on, in which the streets smear and stretch as though the artist could not keep up with the car, and we sat up. We had not expected a Turtles film to do that to us.
Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross score it with low, buzzing synths that sound like a substation after dark, which suits a film that hardly sees daylight, and they know when to step aside for the songs. Greg Levitan’s editing keeps four boys talking over one another and somehow lets you follow all of it; the jokes come in overlapping half-sentences and the cut lands on whoever is losing the argument. At 100 minutes nothing is left in that should have gone.
The casting is the film’s real idea. Abbey, Brown, Cantu and Noon bicker about pizza and about who gets to do the flip, and they sound like brothers rather than a writers’ room. Edebiri plays April dry and slightly cross, a girl who has decided to be a journalist because she is not much good at being a teenager. Rudolph gives Utrom the voice of someone reading out a redundancy notice. And Chan’s Splinter has the scene that got at us: a short flashback to the one time he carried the babies up into the daylight, and how the crowd reacted. It lasts perhaps a minute and it explains everything he does afterwards. We were moved more than a cartoon rat had any business moving us.
The plot is another matter. Five people are credited with the screenplay, Dan Hernandez, Rowe, Seth Rogen, Benji Samit and Evan Goldberg, and between them they have produced the standard one: the outsiders want to be accepted, a villain wants the opposite, and the last half hour trades the jokes for something enormous in the middle of the city, which we will not describe because you have seen it before. The pop-culture references, of which there are a great many, will not all be funny in five years, and a few are not funny now. The gang the turtles are chasing is a crowd of mutants who each get a name, a shape and a line; Rose Byrne and Natasia Demetriou, as Leatherhead and Wingnut, get a handful apiece.
Against the series’ own record this is an easy win. The 1990 live-action film is the only earlier one anyone recalls with affection, and this is warmer, shorter and better drawn. Most critics have landed roughly where we have, and the few who called it hyperactive have a point about the opening ten minutes, which talk fast in case you leave. Stay. It is a PG and behaves like one, so take a child if one is to hand, and if not, do not let that stop you. The drawing is worth an evening on its own, and the boys are good company.
