Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem Review - 7 Ups & 3 Downs
Downs...
3. The Humour Is Hit & Miss
Mutant Mayhem is certainly a funny and charming movie, though there are also moments where the comedic throughline begins to grate.
This is a hyperactive dynamo of a film that appreciably moves at a mile-a-minute pace, much like director Jeff Rowe's previous film The Mitchells vs. the Machines, though it's also fair to say that there are times where that becomes more exhausting than entertaining.
Ultimately there's little here in the way of truly clever, gut-busting one-liners, with much of the humour focused instead on the goofiness of the title characters and their (usually failed) attempts to be ordinary teenagers.
The decision to cast actual young people as the Turtles was absolutely a smart call, but there's a little too much reliance here on letting them riff off one another endlessly in ways that feel quasi-improvised by the voice actors.
As a result, the dialogues often feel loosey-goosey and uneven - like listening to actual teenagers talk, for sure, albeit at the expense of considered, streamlined banter.