Teenage Mutant Turtles: Mutant Mayhem is Better Than I Ever Imagined a TMNT Movie Could Be.

Believe the hype: they made a TMNT cartoon that's not just good; it's great

One of the many wonderful things about Barbie’s groundbreaking, zeitgeist-capturing success is that it proves that movies based on well-known intellectual properties don’t need to be cynical, mercenary or bad. 

Greta Gerwig’s bold pink triumph illustrated that with the right creative team and the right spirit anything could make for a terrific movie. 

Barbie showed that history is not necessarily destiny and that new creators can learn from the mistakes of the past and create something new and essential out of the old and achingly familiar. 

I am not a Scooby Doo fan, for example, but I very much dug Mystery Incorporated, which asked and answered the eternal query, “Why can’t Hanna-Barbara’s lazy, deathless cartoon about a cowardly, hungry dog in the wrong line of work also be David Lynch’s revolutionary surrealistic masterpiece Twin Peaks?”

The Transformers spin-off  Bumblebee similarly showed that Transformers movies did not inherently need to suck and that with the right script and director it could be a joyful throwback to the Spielbergian kiddie science fiction of the 1980s instead of more pandering, soulless garbage.

It is consequently high praise to say that Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem is the Barbie movie of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles franchise. 

It’s better than I ever expected a Teenage Mutant Ninja movie to be. As with Barbie, the studio took a chance and went with writers with a strong, distinctive personality and an obvious love and understanding of the material they’re adapting. 

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem has five writing credits, including one for director Jeff Rowe, who also co-wrote and co-directed 2021’s much-loved Lord and Miller-produced The Mitchells Vs. the Machines. 

But it is understandably being sold as a Seth Rogen movie, since Rogen worked on the screenplay with longtime writing partner Evan Goldberg, produced and voices mutant warthog Bebop opposite John Cena’s mutant rhinoceros Rocksteady. 

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem sure feels as much, if not more, like a Seth Rogen movie than a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie. 

The studio obviously wanted that Superbad feeling for its reboot and understandably figured that since Rogen and Goldberg wrote Superbad they would have it in spades. 

They were right! Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem knows exactly what it wants to do. Even more importantly it knows exactly how to do it. 

It’s a film of ideas as well as a film of riotous spectacle. With a project like this it’s hard to know where ideas originated so it’s common practice to give all of the credit to famous people and none to writers and producers who are not famous. 

So I am going to just go ahead and give Rogen complete credit for making a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie where the characters behave like actual teenagers—insecure, goofy, eager for love and acceptance and overflowing with energy and enthusiasm—instead of lazy caricatures of kids. 

The Turtles of Mutant Mayhem talk over each other. They talk at the same time. They engage in goofy banter and bits that don’t go anywhere. In other words they communicate like actual adolescents and real brothers. 

Mutant Mayhem also distinguishes itself from every other Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie by really leaning into the idea that its heroes are mutants and consequently outsiders hated and reviled by a society that does not understand them. 

The wildly overachieving animated doesn’t see why a movie about the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles can’t be every bit as metaphorically rich as The X-Men. Mutant Mayhem sets itself apart from the rest of the TMNT movies with a surprisingly poignant emotional component in the fabulous foursome yearning to escape life in the sewers and be accepted among humans. 

They are strongly discouraged from pursuing that goal and intermingling with the deplorable race known as human beings by their loving mentor, sensei and father figure Splinter. 

Previous incarnations of this story have depicted Splinter as a stereotypically Eastern figure of wisdom and experience but Mutant Mayhem impishly and irreverently portrays him as a loopy eccentric and true father figure to the boys. 

Jackie Chan is wonderful as the mutated rodent who transformed a quartet of adorable baby turtles into a lean, green fighting machine. It’s a performance that’s funny and surprisingly emotional but also rings true because you’d have to be pretty damn nutty in order to try to teach amphibians the ways of Ninjitsu. 

He may be a furry kook but Splinter also really loves his cross-species children and they really love him. Honestly, the father-son dynamic here is handled more sensitively here than it is in 90 percent of live-action dramas involving human fathers and sons rather than a mutated rat-man and his similarly mutated adopted turtle children. 

While tentatively dipping a toe into the world of crime-fighting super heroics, the turtles meet April O’Neil, the enterprising reporter who assists the gents in their various endeavors.  

In what can only be deemed a sad, cynical attempt to pander to the “Woke” Communist crowd April O’Neil has been hideously re-imagined not as a totally bangable white lady with red hair but rather as a black teenager. 

That, in itself, is unforgivable. Minorities have had their fun. They’ve enjoyed at least two or three years of healthy representation in pop culture so I think it’s time for white straight people to once again monopolize the roles in every movie, TV show or book, as God intended. 

It’s bad enough that the Woke mob bullied M&M and Warner Brothers into giving us grotesque new versions of the Green M&M and Lola Bunny that I did not want to put my penis inside or masturbate to. 

I might have been okay with a black April O’Neil as long as she looked exactly like Halle Berry or Pam Grier and wore tight, skimpy clothing to show off her massive jugs, tiny waist and shapely posterior and, just to make things Kosher, had just turned eighteen. 

That, sadly, is not what Mutant Mayhem gives us. Instead of giving us the scorching hottie that we deserve the Marxists who wrote the screenplay and hate America and white people have created a hideous mutation of their own, a female character that we’re supposed to like because she’s smart, interesting, quirky and relatable and not because she’s a total smoke show. 

THIS is the world that Leftists want, one full of diversity where women are not relentlessly sexualized and people other than white heterosexual males like myself are represented in film, television and other forms of entertainment. We cannot let that happen. Making every adult or teenage woman in the pop culture sphere as hot and fuckable as possible is a hill that I, and every other red-blooded American man, should be willing die on. 

Mutant Mayhem pits the turtles against Superfly, a power-crazed mutated fly and creation of mad scientist Baxter Stockman (Giancarlo Esposito) and the leader of a group of mutants with delightfully offbeat names, character designs and personalities. 

They’re like something out of The Lego Batman Movie, which is high praise indeed. It’s hard to pick a favorite but I am partial to Mondo Gecko, a skateboarding lizard voiced by Paul Rudd who looks and acts like he should be the mascot for a surf and skate-wear company for children from the mid 1980s. 

Throughout Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem I felt like there were moments, scenes and gags specifically for me. I felt the same way about Barbie. I was particularly excited about a soundtrack heavy on some of the greatest hip hop songs all of all time, most notably M.O.P’s “Ante Up”, which is played almost in entirety AND returns a second time in the third act. 

I also love that Superfly’s crew is deeply enamored of 4 Non Blonde’s “What’s Going On?”, which we get to hear in multiple versions, particularly a dance remix. I know this is a controversial opinion, but I actually think Marvin Gaye’s version of “What’s Going On” better than 4 Non Blondes’ version. 

Don’t hate the messenger! I’m just trying to be real. I am not fond of Ice Cube these days, on account of him being an anti-semitic, anti-vax, conspiracy theory-loving right wing Tucker Carlson associate but he does a terrific job as an eminently worthwhile villain.  

I never thought I would be moved to tears by a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie, primarily because I think that crying and showing emotions is womanly and all of my self-esteem is wrapped up in being a macho white man. 

Nevertheless I am excited that people will be going to be seeing the new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie because it is REALLY good movie and not because it’s about characters everybody knows and loves and/or reluctantly tolerates. 

Four and a half Stars out of Five