‘Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem’ Review: Coming Out of Their Shells Again

Born in the 1980s, they’re now the Middle-Aged Mutant Ninja Turtles, but the surprisingly fresh feel of their latest movie proves that it’s possible for the not-so-young to achieve springy renewal.

“Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem” is the titular quartet’s seventh big-screen excursion, and yet another reboot of a franchise that never found its creative footing while jumping from animation to live action and back. The previous features are uniformly dismal, but the new effort is lively fun, closely following the model of one of the best animated movies released this century, “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse.” Like the arachnid adventure, the turtle tale uses intentionally rough-looking (but actually computer-generated) animation suggesting underground comics, frames its heroes as lovable dorks grappling with adolescent embarrassment rather than as cocky jokesters, makes excellent use of many hip-hop inflected pop songs on the soundtrack, and revels in a gritty New York atmosphere. Most notably, this “TMNT” offers plenty of heart instead of, as previous entries did, simply lining up a series of dopey martial-arts fights punctuated by snappy one-liners.

Jeff Rowe, who served as co-director and co-writer for the Oscar-nominated 2021 Netflix animated film “The Mitchells vs. the Machines,” makes his debut as lead director alongside co-director Kyler Spears and again receives screenplay credit, along with Seth Rogen, Evan Goldberg, Dan Hernandez and Benji Samit. That’s a lot of writers, but the team has a unified vision: make Team Green a quartet of cringing, embarrassed, diffident (and hence normal) adolescents who, like others of their age group, ache simply to fit in.

Raised by an overprotective adoptive dad, a giant mutant rat named Splinter ( Jackie Chan ) who was anthropomorphized by the same laboratory-engineered radioactive ooze that touched the turtles when they were babies in the New York subway system, they are forbidden to have any human interaction lest they be treated as monsters. So they sneak around in the shadows but have more admiration than fear of people. They long to go to high school after catching a screening of “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” (a comedy about not going to high school, but whatever). When they witness the robbery of an aspiring teen journalist, April O’Neil (Ayo Edebiri), they disobey Dad’s orders and reveal themselves to her, becoming friends over pizza.

April, who despite her aura of cool is just as awkward under the surface as they are—she once suffered an unfortunate attack of nerves while doing a school news broadcast that resulted in the nickname Puke Girl—is also investigating a series of crimes. When the turtles (who call one another Mikey, Raph, Don and Leo instead of their full Italian Renaissance names) help out, the trail leads to an unexpected mastermind: Superfly, a vicious insect-man who grew up infected with the same supercharged goo that altered the turtles’ fates. The hilarious, angry, demented vocal performance by Ice Cube as the fly guy is another major highlight, and the animators have had a lot of fun designing a thug army of other talking mutant beasts to back him up, such as a warthog (Mr. Rogen), a rhino ( John Cena ), a singing sea creature named Ray Fillet (Post Malone) and a wacky gecko (“introducing Paul Rudd, ” say the credits; keep an eye on this young newcomer).

Though the turtles think Superfly is pretty cool (he takes them to an arcade to demonstrate his bowling skills), he has a less awestruck take on the humans than they do and suggests a radical response to anti-mutant discrimination. Conflict ensues in an action-stuffed series of chases and fights involving increasingly wild displays of animation imagination. More so than usual in comic-book movies, the climactic battles are amusingly daft, mainly because Superfly is such an appealingly weird villain. “Nah, man,” he says, rejecting the turtle-endorsed conciliatory approach to humankind. “I don’t vibe.”

The revolutionary disgust for society as it is, embodied by Superfly, contrasts with a genuine respect for tolerance and inclusion among his green-shelled opponents, with the media playing a critical role in getting the facts right. So the latest and best “TMNT” movie contains a little more substance than may at first be apparent, and this sci-fi reptile comedy admirably advances a message that we can and should all get along, majority and minorities alike.