When I first heard a Batman/TMNT crossover was in the works, right out of the gate I thought it was pretty weird. There's the obvious reasons - it just actually is pretty weird - but also the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles setting is like a Daredevil parallel, and Daredevil is a Marvel character, but Batman is DC. So can they just like... Do that? Can we get an Amalgam Comics animation up in this bitch? But I digress.
Within ten minutes, I was having kind of hard time trying to figure out what tone Batman vs, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was going for. The animation style was something pretty typical of kids shows, plus, you know, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, but then in the first proper fight scene, Raphael drops the knee and straight up splits this dude's face in half, spraying blood everywhere. So I mean... Who is this for? Anyone's guess, really. In that same scene, we get a "We're aliens" joke which is immediately followed up with "Actually we're turtles" for the audience, and one of the turtles delivers the quote "Ninja Vanish Time" to Batman so that the World's Greatest Detective is able to put together that they are ninjas. So they obviously assume that their audience need that awkwardly delivered information.
But with the martial arts background, mask, cape and bladed gauntlets, Batman fighting The Shredder actually makes a lot of sense. And a Ra's/Shredder team-up is maybe a little on the nose, but still pretty interesting. So there's something to this bizarre crossover.
I won't go into every complaint, I had, but let me sweat for this one thing: You can't use "Venom" as a short hand for "Joker Toxin" when you mean "Joker Toxin" and it's a DC setting, where not only is "Venom" a completely different thing that is generally accepted to exist in DC movies, this particular movie even features Bane, a character who uses actual the actual DC item called Venom. There was a moment early on in the piece with a line spoken in a cafe during a breakup of a lesbian couple (kind of a surprise to see in an animated movie, but again, who is this for) that genuinely made me laugh out loud, so hey, you take the bad with the good.
52%
-Gimly
