Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/Paramount/Getty
There’s no coming back from collaborating with Vanilla Ice, as the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles’ disappointing film and TV efforts over the past three decades bear out. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem (in theaters August 2) is yet another attempt at revitalizing their relevance, and its expressive animation almost does the trick, lending distinctive style to the crime-fighting foursome’s latest big-screen outing. Such aesthetic panache, however, can’t totally rehabilitate a franchise that was never cool to begin with and hasn’t aged well since, nor can a script co-written by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg that vainly strives to update the heroes in a half shell for the 21st-century crowd.
Mutant Mayhem’s sole notable calling card is its unique aesthetic, with Mikros Animation’s visuals boasting a hyper-real quality that highlights the (artificial) brushstrokes of its character and environmental models. Director Jeff Rowe’s film is a wholly CGI affair that looks like it’s been hand-crafted, its surfaces (sewer walls, city skyscrapers, explosive clouds of smoke) embellished with bold and scribbled lines. That approach bears a passing resemblance to the imagery of Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse. Alas, the comparison isn’t exactly flattering; whereas Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers, and Justin K. Thompson’s superhero blockbuster was a gonzo amalgam of disparate styles, this reboot picks a single lane and stays in it, save for a brief fantasy sequence that has the appearance of a child’s drawings.
Whereas Mutant Mayhem tries something formally new, it’s otherwise far less adventurous than Rowe’s prior The Mitchells vs. the Machines. A brief prologue relays how, 15 years ago, Dr. Baxter Stockman (Giancarlo Esposito) sought to alleviate his loneliness by creating a new family with a green mutant serum—subsequently referred to as “ooze”—capable of turning bugs and animals into humanoids. Unfortunately, his evil rival Cynthia (Maya Rudolph) coveted the potion and, in a special-ops raid of Stockman’s lab, the scientist’s beloved fly escaped death and a vial of the ooze rolled through a grate and into the sewers, where it coated four baby turtles as well as the adult rat, Splinter (Jackie Chan), who found them.