Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem is delightful. The film an expert examination of a never-ending merchandise machine that manages to chart new, emotionally fertile, ground while reconfiguring plastic commodities so successful that, once upon a time, they had to be rationed. Considering the distinctly homicidal look that Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird originally gave their sinister, sewer-dwelling creations, the ninja turtles have proven to have be a particularly elastic concept. As it turns out, the basic appeal of repulsive-looking amphibians waving around martial arts weapons can survive even the most transformative of takes. Like many big screen adaptations before it, Kyler Spears and Jeff Rowe's film is a reappraisal, taking the four youngsters back to zero to explore their glowing origins. Rowe, Seth Rogen, Evan Goldberg, Dan Hernandez and Benji Samit's screenplay places their greatest emphasis on a previously untapped adolescent longing. One premised on being, essentially, a pack of home school children lumbered with a well-meaning but fanatically mistrustful rodent for a parent. 

Jackie Chan's strung out Splinter isn't the former pet of a displaced ninja master in this continuity, he's a New York rat. Having survived all manner of attempts on his life - even before his run in with luminescent ooze - has rendered him terminally cagey. This well-founded paranoia is transmitted to his sons; the necessity for ninjutsu training coming from their position as despised outsiders who must constantly trespass into man's world for essentials, rather than the original telling's need for a violent act of revenge. While these children are happy to marathon Gordon Liu films in pursuit of bone-cracking enlightenment, their collective desire is an opportunity to be, briefly, apart. To have other friends and indulge interests beyond repetitive board-breaking. These guileless dreams of acceptance are complemented by stylistic choices that relentlessly reject the depiction of these characters in idealised or bluntly superheroic terms. Mutant Mayhem then taking a leaf out of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse's book in terms of prioritising a scribbled aesthetic over a more mundane or (God forbid) functional look. The three-dimensions of computer generated animation are used here to build darting, stop-motion action figures. Each one accented with the kind of scrawls and inky corrections native to schoolbook margins. The Turtles, and their Playmates cousins, are all wonderfully ugly. Their big screen portrayal (finally) delivering on the unrefined but imagination-firing artwork that crawled all over those treasured blister cards.