Review: Funny and vibrant, ‘Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem’ is an easy shell

As box office analysts have noted with equal parts glee and alarm, it hasn’t been the hottest summer for the big film franchises. “Fast X” flailed. “The Flash” fizzled. The latest adventures of Indiana Jones and the Impossible Missions Force performed less stratospherically than expected. Meanwhile, the extraordinary commercial success and cultural staying power of “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer” have been greeted by many as a rare triumph for non-franchise-based storytelling, as well as a pointed referendum on Hollywood’s sequel/reboot overload: Give us originality, or give us depth!

Yet there are always exceptions, contradictions and assorted what-aboutisms: We can argue about how much “Barbie,” a smart, interesting movie that was made to sell toys and surely will mint a franchise of its own, qualifies as original. And this week sees the arrival of “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem,” an unexpectedly delightful challenge to the critic’s reflexive antifranchise mentality.

(Paramount Pictures)

Nimbly directed by Jeff Rowe (“The Mitchells vs. the Machines”) from a funny, perceptive script he wrote with Seth Rogen, Evan Goldberg, Dan Hernandez and Benji Samit, this rambunctious action-comedy gives nostalgia-stoking, action-figure-selling, comic-book-derived franchise relaunches a good name. To say that it’s the best Ninja Turtles movie I’ve ever seen is both perfectly accurate and arguably faint praise, given how many cowa-bungled mediocrities this aging franchise has spat out over the past 33 years — and I say that as someone with fond childhood memories of the 1990 live-action “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles,” with its endearingly rubbery Jim Henson turtle costumes, grotty-looking sewer sets and “Hey dude, this is no cartoon” tagline.

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“Mutant Mayhem” joyously embraces its cartoonishness, if that’s the word for Rowe’s ripped-from-the-pages-of-a-kid’s-heavily-doodled-notebook aesthetic. There’s poetry in this imperfection: Unlike the artificially smoothed, computer-animated turtles of “TMNT” (2007) or their motion-captured equivalents in the Michael Bay-produced “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” (2014), these latest incarnations of Leonardo (voiced by Nicolas Cantu), Raphael (Brady Noon), Michelangelo (Shamon Brown Jr.) and Donatello (Micah Abbey) spring to gloriously sketchy, smudgy pop-art life from their first frame. And they lurk, leap and soar across a neon-streaked New York City that, for all its digital rendering, feels as fresh and hand-crafted as a made-to-order Brooklyn pizza.

(Paramount Pictures)

Sustenance, pizza and otherwise, is of course never far from the turtles’ minds. Their first mission here — to fulfill a lengthy grocery list (and check off a product placement or two) — will require great stealth and cunning, since it’s important that they go unseen by human eyes. They are overgrown humanoid turtles, after all, thanks to a lab-engineered green ooze that contaminated their stretch of sewer 15 years earlier. They’re also teenagers, which only exacerbates their frustration at being lifelong outcasts, something they feel acutely when they sneak into an outdoor screening of that teen-liberation classic “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.” More than most “Ninja Turtles” stories, in other words, this one emphasizes its foursome’s youthfulness, their merciless rib-rib banter, their pop-culture savvy (Michelangelo likes Beyoncé) and, above all, their eagerness to fit into a world that fears and rejects them on sight.

The film’s coming-of-age bent is unsurprising, given Rogen and Goldberg’s involvement (they’re also credited as producers), though anyone hoping for a terrapin-themed “Superbad” is out of luck. Rather than raunching up its material (aside from some impressive vomit gags), “Mutant Mayhem” has been wittily conceived as a comedy of alienation and assimilation. Splinter, the stern mutant rat who raised the turtles, trained them in martial arts and taught them that “humans are the demon scum of the earth,” is basically every overprotective immigrant father in rodent form. (It helps that he’s voiced with unadulterated Cantonese-dad energy by Jackie Chan.)

(Paramount Pictures)

The turtles’ individual gifts and personalities haven’t changed — Leo is still the responsible leader, Raph the courageous hothead, Mikey the lovable goofball and Donnie the brains of the outfit — but a poignant longing for acceptance unites them all. It’s that longing that first plants the idea of superheroics in their bandanna-wrapped heads, propelling them into an enjoyably nonsensical plot involving a shady scientific institute and a mutant-critter crime wave. As the turtles race around the city trying to save the day, backed by hip-hop jams and a propulsive Trent Reznor–Atticus Ross score, they join forces with April O’Neil (Ayo Edebiri), a plucky high school journalist who, in this telling, is almost as much of a misfit as they are.

That speaks to the warmly inclusive spirit of “Mutant Mayhem,” which, while not as exhilaratingly free-form as the recent “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse,” uses its own mercurial visual style to suggest new worlds of representational possibility. And in ways that bring the “X-Men” series (among other properties) to mind, it turns the condition of mutantdom into an effective metaphor for the Other. If that insight verges on obvious by now, the movie nonetheless wears its politics lightly, rarely scoring points with an overworked speech when it can go with a light laugh, a kinetic car chase or a dynamically staged action scene instead.

(Paramount Pictures)

It’s telling that some of the story’s funniest, sweetest moments involve the turtles’ ostensible enemies. Initially disturbing but ultimately disarming, they’re a motley mutant menagerie voiced by actors including Rogen (warthog), Paul Rudd (gecko), Rose Byrne (alligator), Natasia Demetriou (bat) and John Cena (black rhino). Their leader is the aptly named Superfly (a fearsome Ice Cube), who plays a key role in the movie’s climax — a wonderfully grotesque but coherently mapped-out sequence that tips its hat to Godzilla, David Cronenberg and, finally, the we’re-all-in-this-together spirit of New York itself.

Whether it cries out for a sequel is debatable. But I wouldn’t mind seeing if this latest cycle of “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” turns out to be not just a reboot but a renaissance.