TMNT Mutant Mayhem Proves You Don’t Need Shredder

TMNT Mutant Mayhem car scene

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem finally released in Australia last week, which means I was finally able to go see it in the cinema over the weekend. It’s a great film, stylish and charming, and other critics’ comparisons to Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse definitely hold up to scrutiny. Given it’s been out in other regions for over a month at this stage, it’s far too late into the game to be reviewing it. I do have some thoughts about it though, so let’s talk about Mutant Mayhem, the Turtles themselves, and Shredder.

Fair warning, there will be spoilers for Mutant Mayhem, so if you haven’t seen the film yet and care about that kind of thing, don’t scroll past the conveniently placed trailer below this paragraph.

The first thing I liked about Mutant Mayhem was the art style. It’s unique, being different from any movie before it, and dynamic and exciting, shifting and changing as the action plays out. Earlier in the film there’s a bit more of a focus on pencil work, giving much more of a rough sketch kind of vibe, but it does get used less and less as the film progresses. That’s a bit of a bummer, because the pencil sketch vibe, especially for backgrounds, is quite nice, but I can see how in later scenes it might be a bit much visually.

The second thing that stood out to me is that the Turtles actually act like teenagers, which is the first time in… well, it may be the first time in my life, if we’re being honest, that that’s happened. As much as I adore TMNT 2003, there’s no doubt the characters in that series are young adults, even into their early 20s. Other series and movies go in the opposite direction, and make the Turtles too childlike.

Mutant Mayhem’s Turtles are actual teenagers, they do dumb teen stuff, care about dumb teen things, and make dumb teen mistakes. It’s a nice dynamic to see on-screen, especially in the wake of Spider-Verse, which showed that there was a huge, wide-open market for teen-focused animated films.

The third, and perhaps the most refreshing, aspect of Mutant Mayhem is the lack of Shredder. Shredder is the de facto TMNT villain, he’s in just about every iteration of the Turtles, be it TV or film, in various forms. Sometimes Shredder is a man, sometimes Shredder is a woman, and sometimes Shredder is even a weird jellyfish-like alien, as with the 2003 series. But for the past 30 years, in film and TV, it’s pretty much always been Shredder, and that’s exhausting.

Don’t get me wrong, I like Shredder! He’s a fascinating character, a near-unstoppable force of death that bears no face and shows no mercy. I put Shredder in third place in my ranking of every TMNT character, and I stand by what I said there — that anyone could be behind that mask and behind those claws is what makes Shredder a compelling villain. But as compelling as Shredder is, he’s also overused.

Mutant Mayhem goes in a different direction. Instead of Shredder, we have other mutants — Superfly, Bebop, Rocksteady, Mondo Gecko, and Leatherhead, among others. Having a rogues gallery of villains to act as foil to the team of Turtles is fantastic, because it mirrors what these turtle-y brothers have with each other: a team, or even a family.

It also creates a satisfyingly bittersweet conflict between the Turtles and their supervillain counterparts. For the first time in their lives, the Turtles are face-to-face with a group of people just like them. Other mutants, similarly shunned by society, similarly hidden away in the dark parts of the city. They want to be friends with these mutants, they want to share their lived experience, be a part of something greater… but they’re villains, and that’s against everything the Turtles stand for.

Here’s the spoilery part — near the end of the film, they do team up properly. They become friends, they work together, they take down Superfly. It’s a great little moment of triumph, where we get to see everything a mutant can be, and everything a mutant can do. There’s pure joy in the Turtles’ performances when they get to work alongside these other freaks, and it’s a delight to see.

And it all happened without Shredder. For 30 years, for whatever reason, TMNT media has been afraid of not having the franchise’s most iconic villain at the forefront. It’s been afraid of telling stories that didn’t have an unstoppable killing machine mercilessly hunting the Turtles down. And in a little over an hour and a half, Mutant Mayhem proved it was not only possible to tell a story without Shredder, it was maybe even better.

A mid-credits scene did seem to confirm that Shredder would be coming in the inevitable sequel, so it won’t be a Shredder-free story forever. I’m not too worried about that though. If the team behind Mutant Mayhem can do a story without Shredder that’s this damn good, I have no doubt they can do something new, exciting, and refreshing with Shredder too, without having to lean on decades-old storytelling.