I read the high reviews for the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem and expected great things. So I was thoroughly disappointed to see another great franchise turned into a depressing diversified mess.
There were two redeeming qualities for this movie. The first was the art style was interesting. It was simply a fake stop motion with an interesting color palette. The color and style used was a gritty cyberpunk aesthetic. This was an intriguing style, merely because I have rarely seen it used in animation.
The other nice thing I liked about this movie was the conclusion because it included everyday humans. Rather than the standard superhero ending where good guy defeats bad guy, we instead got random civilians helping out to overwhelm the villain through sheer numbers. Once again, this was really only good because we don’t see it often in movies.
Much like many other trash comedies, humor in this movie equates to making pointless references about other things in pop culture What’s worse is that these references are all at least a decade old. Remember Adele, Rocky and Ratatouille? How about the Mr. Lonely song or the He Man – What’s Going On song? It’s felt like this entire script was written ten to twenty years ago, then someone dusted it off and turned it into a recent film. It’s more likely that the writers are just so out of touch with modern culture.
Pretty much every voice actor in this film was an African – American*. They even replaced the European – American* character April O’Neil with an ugly fat African – American*. I care less about the race swap and more about the fact they made her ugly and shaped like a potato sack. Pretty much every human in this film is ugly, because the creators want to normalize the disgusting. The erasure of the beautiful is really an attack on our souls; humans aren’t meant to be obese revolting pigs.
They go even further in diversifying the film through the promotion of interspecies relations. The turtle Leonardo and the African – American* April O’Neil fall in love. The rat Master Splinter and the cockroach Scumbug also have a romantic relationship. It’s just demonic to include this in a movie that’s for kids. The creators will say that we shouldn’t take this interspecies representation seriously because it’s just a kid’s film, but will simultaneously say that we need ugly African – American* characters because representation is serious.
The creators however do lack in representing the turtles as different characters. There were really no defining features or personalities apart from variations in color. This is pathetic, because each turtle has already been provided a personality trait based on previous iterations. Leonardo did however play the leadership role and was given a separate arc where he fell in love with April O’Neil.
I previously mentioned the use of old pop culture music which was irritating. What made this worse was that it wasn’t even mixed correctly and was abrupt to end or start. This is beginner’s level in audio mixing and it’s pretty atrocious that they managed to do it wrong.
Every piece of previous Teenage Mutant Ninja Media is better than this slop. So if you’re looking for a turtle fix, I suggest you choose one of the many alternatives.
