Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem is a retelling of the turtles’ story released August 2. It removes several parts of the classic telling and twists an all-new tale. You can’t ignore the classics, but personally I’m always down for a good “What if?” scenario and that’s just what I got with this movie. It was interesting to see the direction the writers took using new characters and old characters.
The movie itself starts off how a lot of the TMNT stories start off, with the four young turtles being infatuated with the world above them, wanting to feel like they’re accepted like the people they see in the media and just among the residents of New York. Of course that longing to join the world, despite their adoptive father Splinters (voiced by Jackie Chan) warnings, along with the goofy antics that most teen boys get into results in them running into unlikely friends and enemies.
While I did enjoy the movie there were a few thoughts I had come up a few times. First, being a couple relevant plot holes, there was a character who was hunting mutants to “study them”; however, she already had specialized weapons to get them, knew a lot about them and showed particularly clear motivation as to why she wanted them. Don’t get me wrong, the plot was enjoyable and relatively simple as would be expected of a kids movie, there were just a few moments that seem like there could have been an obvious fix.
The new villain in the movie was new enjoyable character, in most shows and movies that feature TMNT it usually ties back to either Shredder or Krang, but in this one the motivations from the villains were uniquely different. The lead villain, Superfly (voiced by Ice Cube) was an enjoyable character who you can sympathize with (to a cartoon-y worldview of course).
Something very particular about this movie was its character design and art style which I found very neat. It was CGI animation, but it honestly reminded me of a lot of stop-motion movies, like James and The Giant Peach or Paranorman, just brighter. You definitely need a unique look to the characters when you’re trying to design such a specific type of creature and tell a different story and TMNT has always had a pretty unique look to its varying movies and shows, this one definitely achieved what I like to think the 2007 movie wanted to look like as far as animated movies go.
When it comes to character designs they were very unique and showed the characters off very well having their own twist to them. For instance April O’Neil had so many of her classic design aspects and was kind of a mixture of the cartoon versions of her. The slightly modernized character designs Mutant Mayhem definitely seemed to take place closer to the present, the references to what they were interested in growing up as well as the current pop culture references were decently relevant. I appreciate that they existed in this movie because of course these teenagers are gonna care a lot about trends, celebrities, and current media, it’s a classic trope.
TMNT Mutant Mayhem definitely wasn’t the best movie I’ve ever seen but it was really nice and refreshing to watch and an overall enjoyable experience. I always love geeking out with my people over the turtles and this movie provided no exception.
