Batman vs. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2019)

Director: Jake Castorena

Cast: Troy Baker, Eric Bauza, Darren Criss, Kyle Mooney

Have I Seen it Before: Nope.

Did I Like It: I’ve been on the record about not liking many of the string of DC animated films. The more essential the Batman story, the more epic in scope, the more disappointing the film ends up being*.

That’s kind of the beauty part of this film. The crossover comic putting the Dark Knight and the Heroes in the Half Shell barely meant much of anything, and the film has little to live up to, and passes those expectations.

First of all, the movie opens with Barbara Gordon (Rachel Bloom) handling things in the way only she can. I submit that there is no other character in the popular culture who is more mistreated than Babs. Warner Bros. cancels whole-ass movies starring her**. Birds of Prey (2020) flat-out forgets that she ever existed. And don’t get me started on Batman: The Killing Joke (2016). Let’s just say that sometimes I feel something less than ambivalent about the animated adaptations of beloved Batman stories.

The Turtles here are well-drawn, feeling modern but occasionally hearkening back to some of their well-known adventures. Better still, they’re all in awe of Batman (Baker, pulling double duty as Wayne and the Joker, and somehow evoking an essence of Conroy and Hamill in the process), and that feels incredibly relatable. I also think Donatello (Baron Vaughn) has a all-vibes crush on Barbara Gordon, which is almost too relatable.

The mashing of these two worlds may not feel like they would go together, but there’s something very nice about putting Batman in a state of discomfort. The re-worked comic covers over the ends credits replace the Outsiders of the 1980s with the Turtles, and that feels like an incisive parallel. We don’t get enough Batman stories that put him as the unlikely center of mismatched a team. There should be more.

The whole film becomes sort of charming, in the end. It’s no Batman: Mask of the Phantasm (1993), but it may just end up being my second favorite Batman animated film. The things I will do if Barbara Gordon is given her fair shot to shine.

How did I get through this whole review without complaining about how adding “vs.” to a movie title obscures the fact that it inevitably amounts to “this set of characters and this other set of characters initially have a disagreement and then decide that they must band together to combat a common foe.”

Well, I guess I just did.

*You can look forward to my inevitably less-than-enthused review of Batman: Knightfall sometime next year.

**When will I get over that? The answer is never.

Turtle Power: The Definitive History of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2014)

Director: Randall Lobb

Cast: Peter Laird, Kevin Eastman

Have I Seen it Before: Never.

Did I Like It: There’s so many stylistic choices in this documentary that baffle me, it feels like I should give the film a thorough pan. The entire affair is padded out with a too-long sequence of people gushing about what the franchise has meant to them over the years. Touching on that is fine, but all of the testimonials seem similar to each other, and I didn’t need the film to tell me that people roughly my age (mostly boys, although they do manage to find one female-presenting fan) would have had a hard time getting out of the late 80s and early 90s without being required to pick their favorite turtle*.

The film spends a lot of time on the production of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1990) (the topic is second only to the development of the cartoon, and rightly so) but next to no time on either of its sequels, and considering the varied qualities of those other films, I think I wouldn’t have minded a little more on how those two went as wrong as they did.

Making most of the film about the friendship and working relationship of Turtles creators Eastman and Laird proves to be one of the film’s strengths, at least in the early portions, as they were apparently a lot of home movies taken of Mirage Studios back in the days before the Turtles fulfilled their commercial potential as cartoon characters and action figures, so we feel like we are there during those heady days. But then, the film ends with some kind of… love theme, I guess you would call it. It’s a song not at all about the Turtles, or the making of the Turtles, but just a reminder of the vibes the filmmaker would want us to feel as the film ends.

*Mine was Michelangelo, although I probably spent some stretches over the course of my youth identifying with all four of the turtles, which probably owes to their enduring appeal.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem (2023)

Director: Jeff Rowe

Cast: Micah Abbey, Shamon Brown, Jr., Nicolas Cantu, Brady Noon

Have I Seen It Before: Nope…?

Did I Like It: As long as the answer is, indeed, “nope,” the film feels fresh and likable. The Turtles feel like they are finally living up to one of those key words in their moniker, and feel like real teenagers for the first time (and I include the original Mirage comics in that comparison). They’ve got girl trouble. They imagine that High School will solve all of their problems, and can only latch onto that delusion as long as they are not, in fact, in High School. They have very specific opinions about superhero films, even though they are surely in one themselves. They mess around making videos displaying their nascent skills. Hardly the art of invisibility, but they are some of the admittedly many fun sequences in the film. Each of the voice actors chosen for the roles also sound like teenagers, with Donatello (Abbey) sounding as if he is demonstrably the youngest of the four*.

The proceedings also manage to avoid leaning on Shredder or the Foot Clan. One might hear that and have images of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III (1993) running through their heads. Fear not, this manages to bring all of the weird (minus Krang) characters who popped up in the action figure line, with their bright colors, and fundamental strangeness. That is, up until the very end where the film feels like it is almost unconsciously compelled to foreshadow a sequel with the Shredder as the main antagonist.

That’s what’s weighing the film down, ultimately. It has disappointing flirtations with being derivative. The film’s feeling—and even many of those aforementioned strong points—owe so much to Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017) and its sequel that Jon Watts might be able to make a case for a producer’s credit. Throw in more than a little of the vibe from Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018) and its sequel, I couldn’t help but enjoying myself, while at the same time wishing that someone might make a movie that uniquely harnesses the Turtles, but then again, I suppose we’ll always have Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1990).

*For some reason—and it may have been established in some other version of the characters—I always thought Michaelangelo (Brown) was the youngest.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III (1993)

Director: Stuart Gillard

Cast: Elias Koteas, Paige Turco, Vivian Wu, Sab Shimono

Have I Seen It Before?: I have a very strong memory of seeing it opening weekend at the now-abandoned Super Saver Cinema. I remember really liking it, both the movie and the theater. I’ve spent most of the two years since it closed half-heartedly considering buying the theater. Such a thing would have been a folly and absolutely ruined me. Now all movie theaters are gone.

I miss movie theaters…

Wait. What were we talking about? Oh. Right. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III. Definitely saw it in ’93. Can’t say I remember ever watching it since then, which brings me to…

Did I like it?: It’s difficult to write the review I would be immediately inclined to write this film. A very dear friend of mine claims this movie as his favorite movie of all time. You don’t want to knock that. You don’t. You don’t.

And yet…

From the very first frame where we are reunited with the four turtles, something has gone wrong in the sewers of New York. Clearly, these movies were never designed to elevate (or really even meet) the art of cinema. They were designed to make money. The producers realized—and mostly correctly—that kids will watch movies about these characters regardless of the circumstances. Why would they continue to pay out the premium money for Jim Henson’s Creature Shop, where there might be a scrappier puppet studio out there that would be more than willing to underbid.

And it shows.

The turtles look rubber, not like any kind of biological creature as I might have previously understood them. It’s actually sort of a virtue of a lesser sequel that it makes its predecessors look far better by comparison. One might have believed the Turtles and Shredder could exist previously. Here, we are very pointedly never shown the bottom half of the sensei, because I’m pretty sure they could not or did not build that bottom half for the money that was paid out. The motions of the turtles’ mouth are preposterous, whereas they were getting pretty damned good with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze (1991).

The film is more claustrophobic, too. Where previous films attempt to fool the moviegoer into thinking that the film might have been shot in New York. This film is clearly shot in the studio and on a few remote locations. It is in every way a cheaper film.

It is also not without its charms. I’m begrudgingly forced to give credit to the film for not blindly trying to resurrect The Shredder and The Foot Clan (especially after the prior somehow mutated his own weaponry). The setting is completely different, and for better or worse you cannot hang the “more of the same” accusation on this sequel. The scenes in feudal Japan have a certain B-movie samurai charm if you don’t attach a lot of expectations to the proceedings.

Hell, if they had only kept the Henson people on the payroll, the movie might have been an unqualified success and we could have gotten a two or three more of these movies.

I’m not sure that would have been a good thing, though.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze (1991)

Director: Michael Pressman

Cast: Paige Turco, David Warner, Ernie Reyes, Jr., Toshishiro Obata

Have I Seen it Before: Almost as many times as the original.

Did I Like It: The first film was a huge success, and as often happens, a sequel was rushed into production. The film doesn’t work nearly as well as its predecessor, and ultimately doesn’t have to. It has a very short grocery list of things it needs to accomplish. Turtles arrive. They fight.

Now, some have noted that the violence of those fights is significantly turned down, even going so far as not having the various turtles use their trademark weapons in combat. In an early scene Michelangelo improvises a line of sausage links in lieu of his normal nunchaku. Honestly? The change in combat doesn’t even occur to me when I am watching the film, and I’m only reminded of it when reading about the film after the fact.

One could pick at the thing that happen in the film. Why does the ooze not only cause Shredder to grow, but also change the sharpness, number, and configuration of his blades? Who thought Ernie Reyes Jr.—an accomplished and capable stuntman—needed to try regular acting this time around? Why is the titular “secret of the ooze” actually what the casual viewer would have suspected all along (that it is just improperly disposed of nuclear waste)? Why is Vanilla Ice playing a club near the wharf, or for that matter, why is Vanilla Ice even in this movie in the first place?

One could pontificate on all of those issues and more, but what would be the point? Should we damn a kids movie for not reaching for more than its basest trappings? Even then, there are moments where this film reaches for more than the sum of its parts. Casting David Warner alone classes up the proceedings quite a bit. There’s also that line where Michelangelo reminds himself to drop a line to Ralph Nader. That’s not a line that six-year olds at the time will get. For that matter, here in 2020 it inspired a fifteen minute conversation about Nader’s career as a consumer advocate before he made a name spoiling (yes, you read that right, didn’t think this review was going to be a reignition of twenty-year-old political debates, did you?) elections.

I’ve seen plenty of films purporting to be for grown-ups that don’t inspire that kind of discourse. Just goes to show you that even films like this can hold some surprises.

If only they had kept it up.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1990)

Director: Steve Barron

Cast: Judith Hoag, Elias Koteas, Corey Feldman, Kevin Clash

Have I Seen it Before: Oh, certainly. In fact, my first viewing of the film became somewhat legendary in my family mythology, but that is mostly because immediately after leaving the theater I puked down an upward moving escalator, thus ruining that particular mall in Dallas forever for a number of people.

But that had little to do with the movie itself, I think.

Did I Like It: A movie based on a cartoon primarily designed to sell action figures that was itself based on a comic book that was a spoof of 80s Daredevil comics* is going to have a hard time producing a film that would be worth watching at all. 

So, it’s saying something that this may be the best big-screen version of the turtles we are going to see. The puppet work from Jim Henson’s Creature Shop (it was one of the last projects Henson worked on before his untimely passing) is remarkable, almost bringing an air of believability to a concept that happily has nothing to do with reality. The mouths of the various creatures don’t quite match up with the voice actors looped in later, but it wasn’t exactly like the cartoons looked like they were pontificating lovingly on the subjects of ninjutsu and pizza. On that front it actually makes the film a pretty solid adaptation of the cartoons, although the more far out concepts like the technodrome and Krang would have to wait for this century and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows (2016).

The film also works where others might have failed by pulling off its most significant illusion and convincing film goers that it actually takes place in New York City. With the massive puppetry work on display, large part of the film had to be filmed in the controlled environment of a studio, but with judiciously edited second unit photography, the film still feels like it takes place in a pre-Giuliani NYC with a crime rate spiraling out of control and a sewer system you might not want to jump into on first invitation.

*Look it up. Just once in a live-action adaptation of Daredevil, I would like to see the young Matt Murdock carrying a box of innocent looking turtles before he gets radioactive waste splashed on his face.