I had never seen any version of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles franchise. I never saw the cartoon as a kid, I never saw the live action movies in the early 2010s, which were not well received. I guess if you had more emotionally invested in the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles franchise, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem might be the all-important definitive movie that you’ve always wanted. But speaking as someone who has nothing mentally invested in this IP, I found this to be a pretty excruciating experience.

After having grown up in the sewers of Manhattan, turtle brothers Donatello (Micah Abbey), Michelangelo (Shamon Brown Jr.), Leonardo (Nicolas Cantu) and Raphael (Brady Noon) have been sneaking out to the world above them and are taken with the idea of living amongst the human world and being accepted there. They come across April O’Neil (Ayo Edebiri), a teen writing for her school paper, who brings their attention to a mysterious criminal enterprise unfolding in the city. They find a group of villainous mutants who have nefarious motivations, and things spiral out of control from there.

Credit is due for casting these characters with actual teenagers – none of the core four are names I recognize, but they all are working actors with credits. They talk the way teenagers talk, obnoxiously, incessantly, constantly talking over each other. And it came to my attention that Megan Fox played the previous iteration of April O’Neil, an apparent attempt to lure fanboys outside of their mothers’ basements to the movie theater. And I’ve heard this new version of the character is more representative to the originals, and that’s a good thing. Between this, the fantastic Theater Camp, and the upcoming Bottoms, Ayo Edebiri is having quite the summer, and she brings an easy charm to her voice performance.

Really, most of the voice actors are well cast and are having a good time here. We have Ice Cube playing the big bad Superfly, we have John Cena, Rose Byrne, Hannibal Buress, Paul Rudd and others playing his minions, we have Jackie Chan playing our characters’ father, and Maya Rudolph playing an over-the-top villain. There’s certainly no shortage of big names here, and yet it all just adds to the noise of what’s wrong here.

Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg lead the writing team here, and this very much feels like a Seth Rogen project. More apparent than anything else, I kept thinking about how exhausted I am by Seth Rogen’s whole stoner-comedy, man-child-never-grow-up thing. You feel Rogen’s influence all over this movie, from the super cringe-inducing pop culture references that start at the top and keep going for the whole damn movie, to the over-reliance on 90’s hip hop needle drops, this is a Seth Rogen entity through and through, and enough already. He has his successful marijuana business in California now. That seems like a natural end point for his career. He has become the kind of entertainment persona that has done one thing in slightly differing ways an infinite number of times, and while most are finding this film very inventive and charming, I was just exhausted and could not wait for it to end.

The animation style could be perceived as very creative, but come on. Rogen and Goldberg saw Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse and thought “let’s do that, but with TMNT.” Certain points hit the distinct visual style they’re going for, and at others it looks ugly as hell. The character design of the entire villain team was visually displeasing to me, and the animation style feels unfinished, I am totally aware that this film’s fans will tell me that’s the point and say that’s part of its charm. But I wasn’t charmed by anything.

While the voice cast is totally game and probably had a good time making this, by the end it felt much longer than its just-over-90-minutes runtime. It’s possible I just wasn’t in the mood for this when I watched it, and it could be improved on a rewatch. But the thing about a really great movie is, it can grab you anywhere, regardless of your mood or predisposition about the topic at hand, and it can change the way you’re feeling. And this film just annoyed me endlessly. I sincerely hope everyone who is expecting great things from this film is thrilled by it, wants to go back to the theater and watch it again, and loves and cherishes it with their whole hearts. But as a casual observer, I just did not care about one single moment. So, maybe there’s more here for fans of the franchise, but Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem may have less to offer for the uninitiated.