Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem (2023)
Four sewer kids want a social life.
Directed by Jeff Rowe · Co-directed by Kyler Spears · 99 minutes · United States
Screenplay: Seth Rogen · Evan Goldberg · Jeff Rowe · Dan Hernandez · Benji Samit
Voices: Micah Abbey · Shamon Brown Jr. · Nicolas Cantu · Brady Noon · Ayo Edebiri · Jackie Chan · Ice Cube
Music: Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross
Definitely recommended — owner confirmed. The review and advisory wording remain an editorial draft.
The most persuasive thing about these Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is that they would desperately like to go to high school. Adults may recognise this as a terrible ambition. To four brothers who live in a sewer and have never been allowed a normal social life, it looks like freedom.
Mutant Mayhem takes that desire seriously. The fighting, ooze and mutant creatures remain, but the film finds its emotional centre in kids who want to be included. They talk too much, encourage each other's questionable decisions and imagine public acceptance as something that might happen if they could just arrange a sufficiently impressive entrance.
The animation understands them. Lines wobble, bodies have awkward proportions and the city looks scribbled into existence by somebody with more enthusiasm than respect for a ruler. The apparent mess is highly organised. It gives an old franchise a particularly lively way to be young.
Before you watch
The film contains frequent stylised martial-arts fighting, chases and creature threat, usually without bloody injury detail. Captive characters are subjected to painful electrical treatment, played with jokes but potentially unsettling for younger viewers. There is also bullying, repeated vomiting, mild language and body-related humour.
The BBFC guidance distinguishes the comic tone from the depicted capture and threat. Those moments deserve more useful description than simply calling every action scene harmless because the film is animated.
Runtime: Paramount lists 99 minutes. The BBFC records a 100-minute cinema submission and a 99m17s home feature; those timings are retained without inventing a different story cut. Paramount's film page also confirms the US opening on 2 August 2023, rating and principal credits.
Heroes as an entrance requirement
Leonardo, Raphael, Donatello and Michelangelo have grown up under Splinter's protective rules. Humans are dangerous, the surface is risky, and staying hidden is supposed to keep the family safe.
The brothers have a different idea. If New York sees them doing something heroic, perhaps people will welcome them. Their friendship with aspiring student journalist April O'Neil gives them a connection to the world they want to join. A criminal investigation becomes a possible route to recognition.
It is an appealingly adolescent plan: solve an enormous external problem and the frightening business of meeting people will become easy. The film finds comedy in the ambition without belittling the loneliness behind it.
The basic conflict also gives the action a purpose beyond assembling familiar characters. Success would change where the brothers can go, whom they can know and what kind of life they can imagine. The stakes are small enough to feel personal even when the danger becomes very large.
Four voices sharing the same room
Cantu's Leonardo, Noon's Raphael, Abbey's Donatello and Brown's Michelangelo sound like a group with a history of talking over each other. The lines are often less important than the rhythm of interruption: a boast gets punctured, an opinion becomes a competition, and a remark can be funny because three other people refuse to let it settle.
Casting teenagers gives that rhythm a texture adult actors imitating kids can struggle to find. The voices carry excitement and insecurity at the same time. Someone can sound certain about an idea until his brothers start responding to it.
The film keeps the familiar differences among the turtles, but the ensemble matters more than a checklist of personalities. They have private hierarchies, collective confidence and the ability to make one another ridiculous. That social life is already rich, which makes their desire for something outside it more touching.
Rowe told Skwigly's Ryan Gaur that he wanted comedy to emerge from character interactions and speech. The choice pays off in scenes where the action can pause and the brothers still provide the entertainment.
There is a limitation: their individual emotional lives are sketched broadly. Leonardo's need to lead and the others' familiar traits can feel like efficient introductions rather than full discoveries. The group energy largely carries that simplicity, though it does not erase it.
The drawing remembers being a teenager
The visual style makes the world feel as if it has been drawn with conviction before anyone has had time to correct it. Outlines, shading and proportions retain a roughness that polished computer animation often removes. Faces look designed by somebody interested in character rather than symmetry.
That effect is built into the work. Mikros Animation's account describes asymmetrical models, textured surfaces and pencil-like marks developed within a largely three-dimensional process. The artists were not simply applying a scratchy filter to a conventional image.
The result matters emotionally. The turtles look like inhabitants of this world rather than clean product models displayed against a grungy background. Their awkwardness belongs in the image. A film about wanting people to accept your odd appearance has found a style willing to value odd appearances.
The design also allows ugliness to be affectionate. A strange jaw, a lopsided face or a grubby interior can make a place more inviting because somebody has clearly enjoyed inventing it. The film's visual confidence is one of its strongest comic resources.
New York after dark
The city gives that drawing style light, colour and depth. Neon, shadow and imperfect surfaces make the nighttime world feel enticing to kids who have been forbidden to inhabit it openly. Looking at it from above or around a corner becomes part of the pleasure.
Production designer Yashar Kassai and the animation teams preserve the tactile appeal of concept art while letting characters move through a substantial environment. The looseness of a line does not prevent a room or street from having readable space.
Cinesite's production account describes the coordination of that look with Mikros and the use of rough textures, hybrid effects and deliberately uneven movement. It also notes that much of the animation holds poses for two frames, with exceptions. The important effect is expressive timing rather than a universal technical rule.
The fights benefit from that attention to space. A prop or an obstruction can become part of the choreography. Movement has effort, and the brothers' excitement does not turn them into perfectly controlled machines the moment a fight starts.
A father whose love has become a rulebook
Jackie Chan gives Splinter warmth and a wonderfully anxious insistence. He loves his sons and has built a whole arrangement around protecting them. The problem is that the arrangement cannot give them everything they need.
This version of Splinter has learned about danger through humiliation and rejection. His fear has a history. That makes him more interesting than a parent whose rules exist only so the kids can break them.
The film also permits a necessary distinction between the feeling and the rule. Loving your children does not make every restriction wise. The experiences that taught Splinter to hide cannot provide a complete map of the world his sons will have to enter.
Chan's voice makes the worry personal, while the action allows Splinter physical ingenuity. It is a pleasure to have both qualities in the same character. He can be an overprotective dad and a formidable fighter without the second cancelling the first.
April supplies another version of the problem of being seen. Edebiri gives her curiosity and embarrassment, including a public humiliation that has made her wary of another attempt. Her connection with the turtles develops through a shared desire to change how other people look at them.
The attractive danger of finding your people
Ice Cube's Superfly brings a different confidence into the film. The mutant group offers the brothers an encounter with beings who do not need their appearance explained. That recognition has an immediate appeal.
The film uses the encounter to complicate the idea that acceptance is simply a matter of finding people like yourself. Shared exclusion does not guarantee shared values. Belonging can ask something of you that you should refuse.
Superfly's charisma is useful because the brothers' initial interest needs to make emotional sense. He has presence and a grievance. The film lets the grievance register while keeping room to assess what he wants to do with it.
The surrounding mutants contribute visual variety and comic texture. Some are more memorable as designs and voices than as developed characters, a familiar limitation of a large ensemble assembled within a brisk origin story. The energy is generous even when the characterisation is economical.
The music gives the city another rhythm
Reznor and Ross provide an electronic score that can make an action passage feel strange or propulsive without smoothing away the image's rough edges. Their contribution belongs alongside the hip-hop selections, rather than being mistaken for the source of every track.
The soundtrack gives the contemporary teenage story connections to an older New York musical vocabulary. Rowe discusses that relationship between contemporary characters and his own 1980s and 1990s associations in the Skwigly interview. The music helps the city feel inhabited by more than one generation.
The choices are particularly effective when rhythm and movement reinforce each other. They give the comedy time to breathe inside the action. The film feels excited to put these elements together, and that excitement is infectious.
Familiar structure, distinctive company
The plot follows an accessible route: a forbidden world, an attractive possibility of belonging, a conflict that forces a choice, and a parent who must reconsider his certainty. The emotional turns will rarely catch an adult viewer entirely off guard.
Some pop-culture references are easy shortcuts, and the final escalation is less distinctive than the earlier scenes of brothers sneaking out and talking. A franchise adventure still wants its large climax. The film's personality is sometimes clearest before it reaches that obligation.
Its strength is that the familiar structure has company worth keeping. The voices, designs, humour and adolescent desire all point in the same direction. The film does not need to reinvent every narrative convention to feel thoughtfully made.
Corny DNA
The premise is extravagantly ridiculous, and the film enjoys its creatures, gross-out jokes and earnest hope of fitting in. Those qualities are deliberate sources of pleasure. They are not evidence of accidental failure.
The strongest rewatch attraction is the combination of ensemble chatter and visual detail. Nostalgia may add something for an established fan, but the movie gives a newcomer enough of its own. Numerical scores remain unassigned.
Verdict
Worth watching — owner approved. Mutant Mayhem makes a convincing case for another visit to these characters through how they sound, move and want things. The owner recommends it.
Its plotting is familiar and its individual character arcs are broad. The animation, group chemistry and affectionate treatment of adolescent awkwardness make those limits easy to accept. This is a lively, funny adventure with an unusually coherent visual imagination.
Spoilers from here
Reveal Superfly's plan, the city battle and the school ending
Superfly's plan to turn animals into mutants would replace human dominance with a new order built around his own grievance. The turtles' refusal gives their wish for acceptance a moral limit. Being welcomed by a group is not enough if remaining in it means accepting cruelty.
The other mutants also turn against his plan. That decision prevents shared origin from determining everyone's allegiance. They can reject humanity's treatment of them without agreeing to his response.
Superfly's giant transformation provides the large-scale city battle. The climax is visually inventive, though the monster spectacle is a more familiar attraction than the brothers' earlier social awkwardness. Its most satisfying turn is the participation of ordinary New Yorkers in helping them. Recognition becomes something reciprocal rather than simply a reward dispensed to heroic performers.
Splinter has to revise his view of humans, too. The film does not establish that his earlier experiences were imaginary. It shows that those experiences cannot justify denying his sons every possible future relationship.
The brothers eventually attend school. Their original, apparently modest ambition has become the destination of the adventure, and the film lets that matter. They want peers, awkward introductions and the chance to be ordinary teenagers. Saving the city earns them an experience the audience may have been taking for granted.
The mid-credits sequence introduces the prospect of Shredder. It is franchise setup rather than the central conflict of this film. The main emotional finish has already arrived in the possibility of a life above ground.
The capture advisory refers to the turtles being restrained and subjected to electrical treatment at TCRI. Their jokes continue during the ordeal, but the pain and loss of control are depicted. Splinter's account of earlier human hostility is also visualised; it should not be labelled merely an offscreen implication.
Sources
- Paramount: official premise, credits, voice roles, release date and runtime.
- Paramount Press Express: director/co-director, story and screenplay roles.
- BBFC: content guidance and separate cinema/home timings; contains spoilers.
- Mikros Animation: primary account of models, textures and the film's visual approach.
- Cinesite: primary case study of design, collaboration and movement.
- Skwigly: Ryan Gaur interviews Rowe and Ramsay McBean about design, dialogue, action and music.
- Nine Inch Nails: original-score release and track listing.
The recommendation is owner approved. This researched manuscript and its new advisory wording remain editorial proposals; no fresh viewing or numerical rating is claimed.