Summary
Hello fellow children, a group of 40 year old guys reinvent Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles for Gen Z and it uses all the buzz words you would expect but does that make up for the glaring issues? No.
I liked Splinter, voiced by the Communist Parties’ own Jackie Chan, and both his role as more of a goofy dad and also his whole arc about learning to trust humans again. I thought both were well done and got you to care about the character. I also thought that the animation style worked well and that during the fight scenes it really popped.
However, that is where my praise ends and my criticism of this film comes in four directions, the turtles themselves, April, the cringe lingo and the horribly and I mean horribly overstuffed cast.
So the turtles themselves bothered me as by having kids voice them it gave them a nasal quality at times that I found made them grating. Moreover, I didn’t like the whole oh they just want to go to high school thing it felt very contrived and out of character for them. When I watched the TMNT cartoon’s as a kid they wanted to be accepted sure but at the same time they want to be ninjas in the shadows not high school students.
April, voiced by Ayo Edebiri, is irritating not because of the race swap or what they did with her character design, but because her character really has no purpose other than to comment on the turtles and go ‘man that’s crazy’, which gets real old real soon. Oh and that’s almost forgetting her side story about sick which they reference again and again in a gross out sort of way to try and give her some character development which doesn’t really work.
The cringe lingo is seeing words like ‘sus’ which unless you are of a certain age or under a certain age you won’t know what that means. Again it is 40 something writers trying to seem hip and write how they think kids today talk. Moreover, the dialogue between the brothers is also quite grating, so I get that it is supposed to be what teenage banter between brothers would actually be like but again it just sounds like kids talking over each other a lot of the time and from a sound mixing point of view that was not great. Perhaps I am just comparing this to the version of the animated show I remember from childhood.
Finally there are just too many characters here, whilst yes some if not all of them are classic TMNT characters they were not all needed here by any means, it also means you have limited scope for villains in the future if they are all pally now. It tries to do too much.
Overall, okay with some redeeming moments but by and large this tries to modernise the turtles and makes them almost unrecognizable.
2.5/5
Pros.
Splinter
Some of the jokes
There is fun to be had
Cons.
The cringey slang
Too many characters
The turtle voices
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Another Millennial Reviewer 