Teenaged Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem Review

*Movie Rating: 6/10

**Film Rating: 4/10

I would like to start this off by saying that I know this movie has a very high Rotten Tomatoes score that doesn't really match the scores I have given them. Nonetheless, if I gave "Mutant Mayhem" any rating higher than the two above, then it wouldn't be a very honest rating from me.

So as always, I want to start with what is good about the movie. The voice acting from the entire cast was really great, specifically the titular turtles. Leonardo (Nicolas Cantu), Donatello (Micah Abbey), Rafael (Brady Noon), and Michelangelo (Shemon Brown Jr.) do a fantastic job of making the turtles feel like real modern teenagers and the way they bounce lines off each other makes their dialogue feel real and genuine. The turtles have never felt more like actual teenagers and they look amazing too. The animation looks great on all the mutants and April O'Neil (Ayo Edebiri) and the animation style lends itself to all the fighting in the movie extremely well. Changing April's age to that of a teenager in high school was an odd choice that worked particularly well for this story. Jackie Chan as Splinter is the perfect casting choice and Ice Cube knocks it out of the park with his memorable performance as Superfly. Besides that, the message they are trying to send with the movie about not looking for validation in others and doing the right thing regardless of how you're treated is a relevant message that everyone should hear.

However, with the good must also come the bad and there are a decent amount of things about this movie that fell flat for me. Starting with animation, while the mutants and April all look genuinely great, every other human in the film looks more mutated than the actual mutants. They look almost as if they had children draw their faces and just used the outcomes as character models. It is especially jarring whenever any human besides April, shares the screen with the turtles because there is such a clear difference in the character designs. At first, I was under the impression that making them look mutated was an artistic choice for the film but even as the mutants see the humans in a different light they never look better. As for the story, while the theme and message they are trying to send is a genuinely good one, the execution is sloppy and gets pushed aside for action and pop-culture references. In addition, most of the other characters in the movie had more depth than the Turtles. Their is very little differentiation between their personalities and giving an in-depth flashback of every other character gives them more depth than the turtles. The turtles character arc also feels tacked on and almost lazy. As if they were so focused on the supporting characters that they forgot they needed to give the turtles an arc and just added it on at the end.

All in all, I do believe that this is the best Teenaged Mutant Ninja Turtles movie ever made but being the best compared to the others doesn't make it an amazing movie. However, if you are a die-hard Teenaged Mutant Ninja Turtles I think you should give it a shot, whether that be in theaters or on streaming, But if you're not invested in the IP then skip it.

Thank you so much to anyone who reads my reviews especially if you got this far, I really appreciate it! I know this review might not agree with a lot of other opinions so if you don't agree I would love to read your reasoning. Hope you have a great day!

*The movie rating is a rating based solely on entertainment value. Purely how much the movie entertains. Bad writing or acting doesn't matter as much for this rating scale because as long as the writing and acting entertain, it will score well.

**The Film rating scale is based on the quality of writing, directing, acting, and other film techniques that go into the film. Just because a movie is entertaining doesn't mean it's written or directed particularly well so it may not score well on this scale.