My Review of "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem"

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem is the latest of movie in the TMNT movie franchise. There have been numerous iterations that have come out and I've never had the same sort of great fun with them as I did with the first movie. This one was a surprising change of pace. I think it might be because they had artistic freedom to change a lot of things to fit today's social climate.

The movie starts off with a little introduction to the ooze that is causing animals to mutate into super beings. A mysterious loner scientist, Baxter Stockman, has created this mutation ooze and had birthed a fly. Due to his lonesomeness he was planning on mutating a bunch of animals to become his new adoptive family.

Word of this mutation gets to some big corporation that wants to weaponize these mutant animals for acts of terror. In order for them to gain access to this ooze they have to infiltrate Baxter's laboratory and reverse engineer the ooze.

This raid goes terribly bad. Baxter dies while the mutant fly escapes with his adoptive mutant family. One of the ooze tubes is accidentally kicked down the sewer and that's how we get our teenage turtle heroes, as well as their patriarchal rat.

Years fly by and these turtles have grown up. Their rat father, splinter, is overprotective of them and has taught them martial arts through various video sources. Being stuck in the sewer for 15 years have made them feel isolated and they want to get exposed to the real world. They of course want to live a regular everyday life but they can't because they're obviously different.

All this changes when they meet their plucky reporter friend named April. Their chance encounter gets them to realize a new goal. They want to help out the citizens of New York so that they won't be seen as monsters. The biggest goal of them all is to stop this mysterious fly overlord that seems to be running the city.

The visuals for this movie are a hit and miss for me. When the action hits this movie is smooth as silk and I wished they kept the movie running this way. Unfortunately this movie falls under the Spiderman animation fad that seems to be sweeping the industry. I have nothing against the spiderman animation but that's for the spiderman world.

Having such similar animation styles and look makes this movie feel like it should belong into that spiderman universe. It blurs the line of what franchise belongs to what. It makes this movie sort of lose a little of its own identity. Though there are obvious differences but it still feels like it's riding on the coattails of a more popular franchise.

Still the art is still beautiful and there are a number of scenes that do stand out. The soundtrack is appropriate and it does have a great selection that really get you into the mood.

I like the fact that this movie is fully aware of itself and throws in a ton of easter eggs for those that are nerding out about the cast, the turtles lore and behind the scenes stuff. For example you have Jackie Chan voicing Splinter and they're training using real footage of old Jackie Chan movies. This was pretty cool and made me chuckle a little. There's tons of in jokes like that sprinkled throughout the movie.

Some of the jokes come from a lot of pop culture references. If you're not brushed up on a lot of pop culture or even slang of this generation you may get lost with a lot of the rapid fire jokes that are being thrown. Fortunately I watch a ton of movies so I was able to keep up. Though, I can see some individuals not being so lucky and being lost at what is being said.

Surprisingly, the product placement in this movie are more subtle than other movies as of late. You'll see on occasion a pizza hut box or other product placements but they're not totally in your face like most movies.

Overall, I had a really good time. There are some genius ideas that they added to this movie that I thought really helped elevate this movie to something better than I thought it would be. It's probably the best time I've had with a turtles movie since the first movie that came out in theatres. I have to give this one an 8.5 out of 10. This is definitely something that I would recommend to most people even if they're not turtle fans.