100 min | PG | August 2, 2023 | Paramount Pictures
Four teenage turtles live in the sewer and want one thing. They want to go to high school and get treated like normal kids. The mutant origin story finally remembers that the turtles are supposed to be teenagers.
Four mutant turtles grow up in the sewers of New York under a rat who raised them to fear the surface world. They are teenagers. They want what teenagers want, which is to be seen and accepted by the people walking around above their heads. Mutant Mayhem treats the origin story as a story about adolescence instead of heroism. The brothers do not dream of saving the city. They dream of getting invited to a party.
Micah Abbey, Shamon Brown Jr., Nicolas Cantu, and Brady Noon voice Donatello, Michelangelo, Leonardo, and Raphael, and they sound like actual teenagers because they are. Their dialogue overlaps and collides the way real siblings talk over each other. Ayo Edebiri plays April O’Neil as an aspiring journalist who froze on camera once and now carries the humiliation everywhere she goes. Maya Rudolph voices Cynthia Utrom, the head of a biotech operation, with a flat corporate calm that makes the menace land harder. John Cena plays Rocksteady as cheerful muscle with no inner life and total commitment to the bit.
Jeff Rowe directs from a script he wrote with Seth Rogen, Evan Goldberg, Dan Hernandez, and Benji Samit. The animation looks like the inside of a teenager’s notebook. Outlines wobble and refuse to close, and textures smear like ballpoint pen and marker. Pencil smudges and fingerprints sit right on the surface of the image. Rowe records the four leads together in one room so their banter overlaps instead of arriving in clean separate takes.
The film knows exactly what it is about. The mutant premise becomes a literal version of the ordinary teenage fear that the world will reject you the second it sees your face. The turtles want to be heroes mostly because being heroes might get them let in. Rowe and his writers never let the action swallow that longing. The fights run loose and chaotic, and the want underneath them stays clear the whole way through. This is the rare action blockbuster that remembers its heroes are kids.