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Review: The New Animated ‘TMNT: Mutant Mayhem’ Movie is Fantastic | FirstShowing.net

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Review: The New Animated ‘TMNT: Mutant Mayhem’ Movie is Fantastic

by Alex Billington
August 4, 2023

Cowabunga!! What a year for groundbreaking animation. Not only is there already Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (read my full review) breaking box office records, pushing the boundaries of storytelling again with psychedelic and mind-blowing visuals – but we also have Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem, which is just as mesmerizing and entertaining to watch. Ever since Sony’s Into the Spider-Verse changed the animation industry forever in 2018, every animation studio has been rethinking how they make movies and what they look like. It’s time to rethink the style in order to craft edgier, more dynamic visuals. DreamWorks Animation has been trying something new with the look of their latest hits including The Bad Guys and Puss in Boots: The Last Wish. However, TMNT: Mutant Mayhem is the first big movie since Into / Across the Spider-Verse to live up to the potential of what’s possible with animation when you really think outside-the-box with regards to visual storytelling. To sum it up: this movie kicks butt! The Turtles are back.

One key reminder which I shouldn’t have to reiterate, but I will anyway: animation is not just for kids. It’s a storytelling technique, it’s a visual style, it’s an art form that any filmmaker can utilize. It’s not just a genre, and animated movies aren’t only for children. Any of any age can enjoy animated movies made for everyone.

Like many geeky kids in America, I grew up loving the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. I’m a huge fan of both original live action movies – Steve Barron’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1990) and Michael Pressman’s campier sequel Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze (1991). I had the toys (including the Pizza Van that shot out plastic pizzas), watched the cartoons, had the t-shirts, and my grandma once made hand-sewn homemade Halloween costumes for my brother & me to dress up as Turtles. As much as I loved them, I fell out of love with the Turtles over the years growing up. Then they tried to bring them back to the big screen – starting with the 3D CGI animated film TMNT in 2007, a hybrid-live action film in 2014 and the sequel Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows. None of these were that memorable. While everyone should already knows this, the TMNT were originally created for a comic book by the artists Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird. It’s quite nice to seem them finally embrace that origin story and give Mutant Mayhem a comic book look with sketch lines and pencil marks visible all over the animated footage.

This movie, directed by Jeff Rowe, and co-directed by Kyler Spears, is a Nickelodeon Animation Studios production at Paramount. Somehow the creative team convinced the studio to let them do something new and the result is awesome. This is one of the best Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movies ever made, living up to the excellence of the original 1990 live-action movie, introducing us to yet another beautifully distinct animation style. I also love what they did with the characters. Similar to how Marvel gave us an actual high school Peter Parker with Spider-Man: Homecoming, Mutant Mayhem give us actual teenage Turtles. The voice cast they chose for this is perfect: Micah Abbey as Donatello, Shamon Brown Jr. as Michelangelo, Nicolas Cantu as Leonardo, and Brady Noon as Raphael. These four really sound and act and vibe like teens, and it makes a huge difference in carrying this story. Mutant Mayhem builds upon the idea that these boys are different, thy don’t fit in, and they want to be a part of the world they’re not allowed to be a part of – the human world. So they hatch up a half-baked plan to become “heroes” so everyone likes & accepts them.

TMNT: Mutant Mayhem Review

It’s clear as day that Mutant Mayhem wouldn’t exist without Into the Spider-Verse, and the connection is obvious. Starting with the glitching logos at the beginning, continuing with the comic book-y art style, along with everything else about it. And that’s totally okay! Rowe and Spears, and all of the animators/artists that worked on this, are not at all ashamed about admitting and borrowing from Into / Across the Spider-Verse, allowing this inspiration to enhance what they’re trying to do – which is reinvent the Turtles and, hopefully, give us a rocking new TMNT movie that captures the spirit of the original comic book characters. They have certainly done just that. Chris Miller, one half of the Lord/Miller duo that produced & created the Spider-Verse movies, took to Twitter to add his $0.02 to the conversation and give this movie the stamp of approval continuing the trend they started. He reiterates it’s the studios that have been preventing animation styles from evolving. “The Spider-Verse films were an attempt to show the breadth of visual possibility in a major studio release,” Miller says. “This year has been a bonanza of animated films with distinct, interesting looks. #TMNTMovie pushes theirs farther than most. It’s a bold bet that should be rewarded.” I agree completely.

While I enjoy Mutant Mayhem immensely, it’s not without a few problems, knocking just a half point off of my rating. It’s greatest issues lie in the absurdity of its fun-yet-bonkers screenplay (written by Seth Rogen & Evan Goldberg & Jeff Rowe and Dan Hernandez & Benji Samit). Most of the story is clever until they veer off course and drift into wonky “why not?” territory with the Superfly villain turning into a mega-monster kaiju. The storyline with April O’Neil also needs some work. She’s an important part of the movie, and has always been an important part of Turtles lore, however her plot in this one felt a bit unauthentic. It feels like the filmmakers were forced to work in her whole “young journalist” plot, rehashing the unexciting concept of her using the story of the Turtles to get her big break. But she’s as young as the teenage Turtles, too. It’s not her time yet, and it doesn’t seem to work well, with all of her social media-ing and puking feeling like they just had to add it in so younger viewers might have something to connect with. All that said, these are minor complaints in the grand schemes of things. And I chuckled at the Superfly finale, wondering if this is a fun nod to the gigantic Stay Puft Marshmallow Man finale in the original Ghostbusters – also a NYC movie.

As a life-long TMNT fan, Mutant Mayhem is the triumphant Turtles return I have been waiting to see for a long time. They got me all warm and fuzzy with nostalgia again. It may have taken an extra 30 years since Secret of the Ooze for them to find the right formula to make the Turtles kick butt on screen again, but I’m glad they found it eventually. I was happy laughing throughout the entire movie at so many of the jokes and the camaraderie between the four Turtles. It’s so clear the filmmakers love them as much as everyone else who grew up with them. Their boundless creativity and ingenuity is worked into every frame, much like the two Spider-Verse movies, and there’s so many Easter Eggs and details to pick up on with repeat viewings. The Hip Hop soundtrack is totally rad, complimented by the groovy Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross score (they got these two guys to score it?! So cool!!). It’s so much fun that anyone will enjoy it – adults and kids and teens and maybe even grandparents. And yes there’s plenty of pizza, always pizza. When the Pizza Van shows up, I knew this was in the right hands. More outstandingly distinct animated movies like this, please.

Alex’s Rating: 9.5 out of 10
Follow Alex on Twitter – @firstshowing / Or Letterboxd – @firstshowing

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John Connors to host Craic Music Fest in New York this month

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Actor John Connors has emerged as one of the most vital – and sometimes controversial – voices in Irish cinema. Agree or disagree with him, there’s no doubting his gift as a screen star.

Connors is back in New York next month at the 25 Craic Fest with his new film “The Black Guelph,” about how Ireland deals – and fails to deal – with its past.

But Connors will also be on site this month to MC the Craic Music Fest on February 24 at Rockwood Music Hall.

First, though, let’s start with his film: “The Black Guelph” is his hard-hitting drama about the way generations can unwittingly hand on trauma – and consequences – to the ones that follow them, but it is also a black mirror reflection of the kind of country that Ireland actually is. 

“The Black Guelph were a group of people in ancient Rome that wanted to uphold the power of the Pope, they were pope loyalists, and anybody went against them, The Black Guelph either massacred or banished them,” Connors tells IrishCentral, with the kind of follow the dots speaking style that can infuriate his critics.

“What we’re essentially saying,” he continues, “is that the Irish state and successive governments are The Black Guelph, because they protected the power of the church’s interests over time.” 

The film is set in the modern day, he continues. “We follow a young man called Carl who has drug addiction problems and who is selling drugs, and you see him as a bit of a thug, a bit of a gangster.”

Soon we settle into the assumption we watching a film about his struggles but then his father comes into the situation, the father who once abandoned him, and we get into his father’s story too. 

“Eventually audiences figure out that we’re actually watching a film about intergenerational trauma, but specifically about the effects of intergenerational clerical abuse, about how all that trauma gets passed on.”

It’s heavy subject matter, Connors is the first to admit. “But there has never been an Irish film that has carefully examined the intergenerational trauma arising from clerical abuse. It’s something we’ve avoided. Yet it’s such a massive problem in Ireland and I think it’s a big reason why we have so much drug addiction, alcohol addiction and so on. These are just the tools that people use to repress their emotions rather than to express themselves.” 

To be clear, did you say that the church colluded with the government to look after its interests, I ask? Is that what you believe?

“Absolutely and literally. Of course. That’s clearly what happened. And it was about protecting the institutions against the interests of the people. The Irish state has never acted in the interest of the people. Or at least not all the people. And I could still say that today,” he continues. 

“Instead it has always acted in the interests of the powerful elites, who are all attached to the big institutions. We are a small country. And the people who run the institutions are all friends that are all in the one club. And you know, we the ordinary people also definitely colluded with the church.”

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Breakout Irish star Graham Early in The Black Guelph.

Recall that the last Magdalene Laundry in Sean McDermott Street was still open in Dublin until 1996, Connors reminds me. “And since then, there hasn’t been real justice. The redress system was set up in order to address the problems and grievances of abuse survivors, the physical abuse, the emotional abuse, and people were supposed to lodge a a claim and get money, but what would actually happen is that they’d have to go on the witness stand and be lambasted by the state’s solicitors and by Vatican employed barristers, or a combination of both.”

Lawyers would say the most unbelievably ugly things in the church’s defense, Connors said. “A disgusting thing is that they call the victims liars, and there are loads of public transcripts for this. A lot of people who went through that redress board system after taking the stand said they felt that they betrayed themselves and betrayed the rest of the survivors. And, you know, it was reliving the trauma for them all again and opening up all the wounds.” 

Connors’s new film goes into that system in what he calls “a very important and pivotal way” to show what it was all about “and how corrupt – and I would go as far as saying evil – that system was set up, and the redress board system, because it has to be been one of the worst things they did.”

It’s not all trauma and outrage onscreen, Connors adds. “There are so many beautiful things about being Irish. I think we’re great storytellers and great rogues. But that’s the veneer of Ireland, the storytelling and the charisma. Behind that that we repress so much, and there’s a real darkness to the place, and we all became experts in repression.”

He adds: “You know they say what isn’t said becomes a symptom. And that symptom can become a disease, and that disease can kill. I think what happened with the Catholic Church is a perfect example of that symptom. Some people didn’t want to talk and some people were silenced.”

“We don’t want to talk about the trauma, we don’t want to talk about what happened, we want to act like this was all ancient history, in prehistoric times. Because we’re still we’re still seeing the ramifications of all this trauma, all this unresolved trauma, we continue to see it. It’s getting passed down every generation and if you don’t resolve it there will be generations ahead that don’t even know where it came from.”

John Connors takes on the legacy of trauma in The Black Guelph

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John Connors takes on the legacy of trauma in The Black Guelph

You can tell he is only getting started with his desire to hold the mirror up to his country. You can tell his screening and talkback at the Craic Fest will be a sell-out on the night. 

Meanwhile, he is also going to host the Craic Fest concert, which this year will be an exciting blend of music and standup. Previously he has performed his one-man show “Ireland’s Call” here, but this night will see his unscripted but always engaging stage presence emerge.

“I’ve been over five or six times now and I suppose I’m a part of the Craic Fest history. Terence Mulligan, the festival director, and I are now friends and I believe he is concerned for survival of Irish culture in America, which I think is really important. 

“I think the festival has influenced American culture in a very positive way, and probably shows the best of Irish and maybe left behind some of the bad stuff. So yeah, it’s the festivals 25 year anniversary and he asked me to come over and emcee the event. Obviously, there’s a great lineup of spoken word, people in comedy and songs so I said, why not? It’s a going to be a great festival!”

Slated to appear at the Craic Fest concert are comedians Siobhan Fallon, Katie Boyle, and Craig Geraghty alongside musician Brendan O’Shea and surprise guests!

The Craic Music Fest concert will be held at Rockwood Music Hall on February 24 at 7:00 pm. You can book your tickets online here. For more information, visit TheCraicFest.com. 



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New York’s First Irish Theatre Festival returns to live performances!

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After a long pandemic led hiatus, the annual First Irish Theatre Festival is finally back on the board with live performances this month.

Theatre is a community activity, but since the pandemic, all major social gatherings including most stage productions had to be spiked. Until now.

Vaccines, masking, and basic health precautions have allowed one of the world’s oldest art forms to take steps toward full recovery and no one is happier about it than Origin Theatre and First Irish Theatre Festival artistic director Michael Mellamphy.

Perhaps it’s because as well as the festival director he’s also a working actor who will finally get back on the Irish Repertory Theatre’s stage as part of this year’s showcases.

Origin 1st Irish a week away 🎭 – https://t.co/ywCIzdYExG Spotlight on just some of the highlights from this seasons Origin 1st Irish! #origin1stIrish2023 #origin1stIrish pic.twitter.com/RN2Q9OyHMh


— Origin Theatre Company (@OriginTheatre1) January 6, 2023

“I’m performing ‘The Smuggler’ by Ronan Noone and directed by Connor Bagley at the Rep,” he tells IrishCentral.  “It’s a one man show I did at the First Irish Festival back in 2018 and then we were due to perform it at the Rep in April of 2020, but something happened around that time, I can’t remember quite what it was…”

Like everyone else, Mellamphy was forced to put the play and indeed his own career on the shelf for an extended period and this marks the first full return to live productions for the long-running festival, which is now in its fifteenth year.

Origin Theatre is a is an artist led company now, Mellamphy reminds me. “I think the best way to lead is to allow the artist to get up and do their thing as well.”

Combining theory and practice, he will lead the festival and star in this verse play from January 18 to February 26 addressing very timely themes: immigration, human trafficking, and the sometimes deeply dehumanizing way that people here can talk about such things. 

“I think this is very relevant, not just for America, but for what’s happening across the world right now with the splintering of views and ideas, and you know, a lot of the reactionary politics that we’ve had.”

The play is set in an imaginary area called Amity, which is very heavily rooted in in New England and Martha’s Vineyard,” Mellamphy explains. If that rings a bell it’s because that was were the real life Florida Governor Ron DeSantis cruelly shipped some unsuspecting immigrants in the hope they would be rejected instead of embraced.

“Like you, I’m an immigrant to this country. But there is a certain kind of a hierarchy, depending on where you’re from, and what language you speak, and how much melanin you have in your skin. The play takes on a lot of these in a very provocative and very Irish cheeky way. I’m very excited to stage it, you know?”

The festival opener will be provided by Dublin’s acclaimed Fishamble Theatre Company. “They are bringing over a wonderful new show by the Rooney prize-winning writer Eugene O’Brien, called Heaven beginning on January 11 and directed by Jim Culleton, who is an Irish Times Best Director award winner. 

Set in County Offaly during the weekend of a local wedding, guests Mairead and Mal (Andrew Bennett and Janet Moran) are struggling to keep their marriage together. In the hope that attending a wedding will help, or raise questions that are difficult to answer, Heaven looks at family bonds, life decisions, and the ever elusive search for happiness in contemporary Ireland.

“Meanwhile we have encouraged Big Telly Theatre Company from Northern Ireland to make their first foray over here into the United States, performing for First Irish,” Mellamphy says.

“They’re pioneers of very immersive site specific type of theater and they’re bringing us the New York premiere of their acclaimed, immersive take on the classic Frankenstein story called ‘Frankenstein’s Monster Is Drunk,’ which is based on an award-winning short story by Owen Booth. It will play at 59 East 59 Theatre from January 11 until the 28.

Herself by the noted Irish American playwright, poet, and performer Tim McGillicuddy is a dark and sometimes comic look into the destructive power of gossip that’s set in a haunted pub where a young woman returns to her hometown (following the death of her brother) to confront and try to transform the rumors of the past. The play will have a dramatic reading at the New York Irish Center in Long Island City on January 11 at 7 PM, tickets are $5.00.

‘It’s In The Play’ by Orlagh Cassidy and Kate Lardner is an intimate reconstruction of the puzzle of a fractured family’s story that explores memory, loss, and love in a manner both heartbreaking and humorous from January 20 through January at The Cell theatre in Chelsea.

‘The Funny Thing About Death’ by Kim Kalish is an Edinburgh Fringe sensation, which sold out a 5-star run in August. The award-winning sketch performer, improviser and storyteller is an Upright Citizens Brigade alum and a Conan O’Brien regular.

The show takes us through Kalish’s grief after losing the love of her life at just 23 years of age. Steeped in the agony of lost love, and that all too human condition of grieving, the play reminds us it’s okay to not be okay because that’s the funny thing about death. The show runs in repertory from January 20 – 29 at The Cell.

‘Dublin Noir’ by Honor Molloy will be presented in association with Irish American Writers and Artists (IAW&A). Set in August 1939 as Europe is on the eve war, Ireland has decided to have none of it.

On a day trip to Drogheda, Dubliner Tadgh Steele is captured by a dairy farmer named Murphy and locked in a cowshed. Is Tadgh a poet as he claims or as Murphy suspects a Nazi spy? Come to the Irish Arts Center for the reading of this new play by the award-winning playwright on January 29 at 3 PM.

‘Peace and Love In Brooklyn’ commands interest for being that very rare thing, an Irish musical. “It’s on for one night only on January 28 at 7 PM on the main stage of the Irish Arts Center, who we’re really partnering up with this year in a big way,” says Mellamphy. 

Written by Eamon O’Tuama, an Irish writer based in Queens, it’s a story about a young musical prodigy born to a couple who had a little fling back in the early 70’s. “Father and son have never met until one night when the mother hums a melody she has carried for years. A musical thread unravels and a 30-year journey begins in Brooklyn.”

Other festival highlights include a very special staged reading of the play ‘Brigid’ by Maura Mulligan, featuring songs from the Grammy-winning vocalist Susan McKeown and then a Brigid’s Eve talk back at the New York Irish Center. 

‘Those Who Pass You On The Streets’ stars John Duddy, Labhaoise Magee, and Ciaran Byrne (who also directs) is Laurence McKeown’s new work about an RUC widow who walks into a Sinn Fein office seeking assistance with the anti-social behavior in her area.

An unlikely friendship with community officer Frank begins, challenging their pre-conceptions and beliefs, as well as family and political loyalties. The reading runs on January 29 at the Irish Arts Center at 7 PM.

For a full list of performance times, venues and tickets visit origintheatre.org.



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