Starring Micah Abbey, Shamon Brown Jr, Nicolas Cantu, Bady Noon, Hannibal Buress, Rose Byrne, John Cena, Jackie Chan, Ice Cube, Natasia Demetriou, Ayo Edebiri, Giancarlo Esposito, Post Malone, Seth Rogen, Paul Rudd and Maya Rudolph

Directed by Jeff Rowe

Paramount, out now

The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles are back and in a post-Spider-Verse world they’ve never looked better.

The guest cast on this movie demands attention. When Paul Rudd as an amiable gecko is the fifteenth best thing about your movie you’re on a winner. Pretty much everyone gets some fun stuff, with Rose Byrne and Natasia Demetriou especially fun as Leather the alligator and Wingnut the bat. Rogen and Cena’s Bebop and Rocksteady are even more fun than you’d imagine too and the two lunkheads get some surprisingly sweet moments. Ice Cube’s Superfly is a monumental villain in every sense and his snarling, posturing delivery is perfect. He’s confident in every way the turtles aren’t and they’re decent in every way he isn’t and the movie gets some of its most surprising beats from that. Also from the moment where the near genocidal Superfly points out to Jackie Chan’s Splinter just how alike they are. There’s a lot of very smart exploration of privilege, bigotry and prejudice here and it’s handled with intelligence, compassion and way more nuance than you’d expect.

A huge part of that, and the beating heart of the movie, is the kids themselves and brilliantly, they really are kids this time. The four turtles (Capital T on the Teenage) are brash, terrified, fragile and relentless by turns and the four leads are staggering good. Micah Abbey’s kind and smart Donatello and Shamon Brown Jr’s charismatic Michelangelo are the backbone of a lot of the movie’s best jokes while Nicolas Cantu’s magnificently awkward Leonardo and Ayo Edebiri’s revelation of an April O’Neil carry a lot of the heart. Cantu’s Leonardo is much more of a leader than he thinks he is and Edebiri’s unflappable April is very much the honorary fifth turtle. Another teenager and a high school student who wants to be accepted as badly as they do she’s got the brains where they’ve got the ninja skills and the five of them make a formidable and only slightly panicked team.

Special mention must go too to Brady Noon’s Raphael reimagined here as a cheery tank who wants to violently hug his impulse for justice. That’s one of the keys to the movie’s success; the fact the turtles are allowed to be different shapes for once. Raph is huge and the flashback sequences with the turtles as babies and Raph as a cheerful brick with a shell are adorable. They also serve to emphasize the individuality at the core of the movie. No one is just what they look like and Superfly and Splinter learn that at far different speeds to the kids. They do this in a colossal ending sequence that echoes one of the best elements of the Andrew Garfield Spider-Man movies and confirms just how big hearted this story is.

The animation, by Mikros and Cinesite, is staggeringly good. It’s got a lovely, nervy hand-held quality that gives the characters even more individuality. Stylistically, it’s the cool kid who makes felt-tip art and shares ’90s hip-hop mixes with the art style of the Spider-Verse movies. It’s frantic and expressive, funny and horrific and as complex as the city it’s based in and the ninjas (big stick and all) who defend it.

Verdict: Mutant Mayhem is incredibly good fun. If you’ve never watched a TMNT movie, start here. If you’ve watched the others, start again here. The kids are way more than alright. 10/10

Alasdair Stuart