8/10 On an early August Wednesday, a new update of “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” slipped quietly into theaters underneath the Barbenheimer apocalypse, sparsely advertised as a labor of love from “permanent teenager” writer/producer Seth Rogen.

TMNT media always seems to fill a sarcastic, post-popularity role in superhero media, arriving to the ecosystem well after the late-arrivers, in this case Paramount arriving several years after Sony and Warner Bros. I have a hard time wrapping my head around a new, low-budget TMNT movie in 2023, but Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem! counts among the best movies of the year and has a strong case to be Rogen’s and creative partner writer/producer Evan Goldberg’s best work.

New York City Sewers, 2023- For 15 years after an experimental mutagenic ooze contaminates several baby animals, mutated turtles Leonardo, Raphael, Michelangelo and Donatello (Nicolas Cantu, Brady Noon, Shamon Brown Jr. and Micah Abbey) have studied ninjutsu under their adoptive father, a similarly mutated rat called Splinter (Jackie Chan) underneath the mean streets. The turtles, lanky, young and just learning to assert themselves, yearn to join the human world and go to high school, but Splinter, who lived the experience of being a rat in New York City, forbids them from being seen.

Eventually, the turtles protect and befriend high school journalist April O’Neil (Ayo Edebiri), who enlists them to help investigate a series of high-tech robberies that eventually leads them to a whole gang of other mutants. The joy at the discovery of a new extended family is tempered when its leader, Superfly (Ice Cube), reveals their goal – to destroy humanity so the mutants can rule the Earth.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem! is an ultra-stylized grungy moodpiece full of references to movies with the kind of budget Rogen and Goldberg can’t pull. Shots are lifted from The Raid: Redemption, Blade Runner and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off to name a few, and the heavy retro-synth sounds mostly recall A Nightmare on Elm Street.

Heavily inspired and enabled by 2018’s Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse with its wild, shifting animation, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem! takes its format to the limit in every way it could think of. Rogen has said the goal was to emphasize the “teenage” aspect, and the movie evokes the imagination of a teenager. The entire production is designed as the sketchbook of a budding artist, extremely talented and imaginative, but unrefined, too busy for its own good and bursting at the seams with detail.

All of the character designs are outlandish and fun to look at, but the highlight is Superfly. He talks with his arms and has four of them, doubling what his body language adds to his dialogue, and his upper-right arm is engorged and asymmetrical to the upper-left, giving him even more texture. You can see the film working to make full use of its tools with his every line.

The exaggeration and the stop-motion feel also evoke comic books, which are often forgotten as the source material for these turtles. The film is often punctuated by bold, romantic splash pages, but just as frequently falls back to swimming, frenetic camerawork, further putting you in the headspace of a teenager. I’m not sure I love the action scenes, which are mostly confined to a long montage in the middle of the runtime of the turtles beating information out of various heist crews working for Superfly, but they focus on ambitious cross-cutting and expressing the turtles’ physical superiority in stills – again, very comic-like.

Most of the dialogue has a delightfully improvisational feel, and that’s by design. Where most animated movies are recorded in private sessions and stitched together in post-production, most scenes for Mutant Mayhem! were recorded in a group setting that allowed for creative sparks to fly, and in-studio performances were used as reference points for animation.

I hate coming-of-age stories as a rule and usually hold Rogen and Goldberg’s own debut, Superbad, as a prime example of their usual pitfalls, but Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem! is specific enough to have those problems. Maturity and the turtles’ optimistic, youthful outlooks are the main drivers of their conflicts. It’s a narrow story that can’t play out of the lead characters aren’t young. 

Appropriate to how much Mutant Mayhem! invokes other movies, media is central to the conflict. The turtles love humans because their exposure to us has been through pop-culture, meaning they think high school is fun and cool, for the critical example. This drives philosophical conflicts with Superfly and Splinter, who have first-hand experience of our cruelty and greed. It would be great if the other gaggle of mutants had more to add to that than to align with one of these poles, but instead Superfly turns into a giant monster and they have a big kaiju fight.

Mutant Mayhem! is firmly set in the 2020s, with namedrops for TikTok and AirDrop among other technologies. O’Neale, in high school, is clearly a digital native. It’s the story of a genocidal minority being exposed to the outgroup, vibing with them a bit, and realizing it was their leader who was making them so angry. The climax has the turtles fighting to get a big, glowing blue orb down the genocidal demagogue’s blowhole – it’s not subtle.

As pointed as Mutant Mayhem! is, what makes it so Rogen is its laid-back vibe. From a filmmaker who’s carved himself out a niche as “the stoner,” the movie that lays off the onscreen ganja and the aesthetics of marijuana to tell the story of some teenagers who took the time to chill with some strangers and decided not to kill everyone.

Leopold Knopp is a UNT graduate. If you liked this post, you can donate to Reel Entropy here. Like Reel Entropy on Facebook and reach out to me at reelentropy@gmail.com.