Rando! Batman Vs. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

I am the father of Declan, a superhero-obsessed four year old, as well as a pop culture website proprietor who writes about new movies, which is to say that I write exhaustively about superhero movies. As a result, I am continually watching and writing about the very characters Declan loves while my son is not around. 

Declan is very plugged into superheroes in all of their majesty and ubiquity, even more than the typical four year old boy. He is particularly attuned to the all-important difference between superhero entertainment for kids and superhero entertainment for “grown ups” although in this context the term “grown up” is employed very loosely. 

Suicide Squad, for example, is a very good example of a movie my son would not want to see because it’s a “grown up” superhero movie even though its target audience is emotionally stunted Hot Tropic-frequenting man-children and maladjusted twelve year olds. Suicide Squad may not be appropriate for four year olds like my son but it’s the antithesis of an adult movie. Merchant-Ivory it is not but when it comes to the kid-friendly/for grown-ups divide I’m comfortable with anything PG or more intense falling on the “for bigger kids” or “maybe when you’re older” side, especially since my son seemingly likes being too afraid of favorite characters like Man-Bat and The Lizard to even watch their animated adventures as much as he likes cheering on Bat-Man and his favorite, Spider-Man. 

My boy loves Bat-Man and digs the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles yet when Nickelodeon and Warner Brothers animation finally yielded to the angry demands of the comic-book loving public and combined these two cultural juggernauts into one direct-to-streaming animated movie guaranteed to tantalize stoned, nostalgic RedBox customers, it fell predictably on the “grown up” side of the great divide with a PG-13 rating for some moments of bracingly graphic violence. 

Now when I tell you that of course Batman Vs. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is an adult film I know what you’re probably thinking. The film in your sick imagination is probably a cross between Caligula, Behind the Green Door and Faces of Death, full of taboo-shattering inter-species fuck-fests, motherfuckers getting straight up stabbed in the eyeball, angry rivers of blood spurting everywhere and orgies of ecstatic, fetishized death as far as the eye can see. 

Batman Vs. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is not quite that extreme or explicit but there is a certain transgressive allure in seeing unusually graphic violence in a Nickelodeon controlled franchise like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. In the moderately gritty universe of Batman Vs. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, the bad guys don’t just kill people; they straight up decapitate some unfortunate souls. 

This is a PG-13 version of gritty so it’s adorable as well as sometimes bleak. Besides, a movie that features the Batman uttering the phrases “It’s pizza time” and “Cowabunga” can only be so dark in its worldview. 

This answer to the prayers of so many 12 year old boys throughout the decades finds the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles leaving their comfy home terrain of New York for Gotham City as they investigate arch-nemesis Shredder’s mysterious new collaborator. 

Batman initially sizes up these curious “meta-humans” rising up from the sewers with unknown origins and equally cloudy motivations as possible enemies in his never-ending war on crime but being the world’s greatest detective, it does not take him long to figure out that while the Turtles may have a whole lot of attitude they’re ultimately on the side of good. 

Batman Vs. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles wastes little time delivering on the irresistible nostalgic appeal of its titular conceit. If you’re a Gen Xer who has wasted even a single moment wondering who would win in a fight, Batman or Shredder, Batman Vs. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles not only has an answer for you, it has two. 

In what we can all agree is the greatest crossover in history, Batman and Shredder mix it up twice over the course of Batman Vs. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. In both instances a lot of thought and care went into the staging and fight choreography, in ensuring that this adolescent wet dream of pop-culture awesomeness lives up to the expectations of everyone’s inner child. 

Batman and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles soon discover that Shredder’s mystery collaborator is the malevolent Ra's al Ghul and that he and Shredder, along with their minions The Foot Clan and the League of Assassins have nefarious plans for Gotham City and the rest of the world. 

The Foot Clan look legitimately spooky and badass here; unfortunately they still seem to fight as well as trashcans. Alas, this would not be a contemporary superhero team-up movie if it did not seem to prominently feature half of the villains in existence. 

A good chunk of Batman’s rogue’s gallery, including pretty much all the A-listers, including, but not limited to, Scarecrow, Bane, Two-Face, Mr. Freeze, Harley Quinn, Poison Ivy and of course the Joker, do double duty as secondary bad guys, first in their original form and then as viscerally disturbing mutations after the various miscreants of Arkham Asylum fall under the spell of the Ooze and turn into nightmarish human/animal or human/plant monsters reflecting their interests in life. 

Poison Ivy, of course, achieves her lifelong dream of becoming a predatory plant when she mutates into a  giant evil Venus Flytrap that would be a whole lot more dangerous if it wasn’t so damn sedentary. In a chilling development fitting for such a cold-blooded fiend, Mr. Freeze is transformed into an evil, anthropomorphic polar bear while the Scarecrow becomes, inevitably, a man-sized crow in people clothes who doses one of the Turtles with his fear serum, leading to the kind of trippy, psychedelic sequence that would traumatize my son if he were to see it. 

On a similar note, my son loves Man-Bat but is too scared of the very idea of him to actually watch a movie or television show featuring the character so he would be both mesmerized and traumatized by a bravura sequence where Bat-Man is subjected to the mutagen and essentially  turns into a monster who looks and acts and becomes Man-Bat without technically morphing into the villain. 

The set-piece where the Turtles and their new pal Batman encounter fascinatingly monstrous villain-animal mutations of classic Batman bad guys, including a double cat-headed Two Face and Joker as a giant snake represent the film at its most refreshingly adult and complex. Batman Vs. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles goes to some impressively dark, violent and ghoulish places but is always willing to pull back because, at the end of the day, this is a Nickelodeon/DC Animation collaboration, and both sides have lucrative intellectual property to protect. 

Troy Baker, an old pro at voicing Batman after handling the role in various Lego DC properties, does double-duty as a stoic, manly Dark Knight and a brazenly theatrical Joker, who is a total animal even before the Ooze turns him into a literal as well as figurative snake. 

There’s so much going on plot and character-wise that adding Batgirl and Robin to the mix feels excessive and unnecessary but Crazy Ex-Girlfriend star/creator Rachel Bloom makes Batgirl a whole lot more compelling than she’s written while Brigsby Bear star/co-screenwriter Kyle Mooney of Saturday Night Live plays Michelangelo as the ultimate fanboy, an audience surrogate overjoyed to be in the presence of badass superheroes like Batman and even superheroes like The Penguin, who blows his mind with nifty gimmicks and gadgets like a helicopter umbrella that gives this otherwise flightless bird the ability to soar over Gotham City. 

Michelangelo is a party dude with a noted weakness for pizza. I appreciated that his approach to dealing with the kind of advanced technology that has become a cornerstone of seemingly every superhero story is to mash buttons and hope for the best. That, perhaps not coincidentally, was also my strategy when playing the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles arcade game when I was twelve years old. 

I was not disappointed by Batman Vs. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles but I can’t help but think of it as corporate product as much, if not more, than a creative endeavor. Being the father of a superhero fiend and a pop culture writer during the great superhero boom, I’m inundated with product related to DC and Marvel, only some it film and television-based. 

DC Animation knows what they’re doing, for the most part. They are as solid in their take on the various members of the Justice League as the live-action division is spotty. So while Batman Vs. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is superior corporate product from Nickelodeon and Warner Brothers/DC it nevertheless feels more like something to be consumed, enjoyed in the moment and quickly forgotten about rather than something to be savored. 

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