In a summer where the off-the-boards success of original movies including Barbie and Oppenheimer is all the rage, the seventh-or so feature film iteration of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles franchise wasn’t one with great expectations. Except when you read the credit block and discover the co-writers and producers are none other than Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg and the director is Jeff Rowe, who most recently was an Oscar nominee for the wildly inventive animated hit The Mitchells vs The Machines.

They have delivered exactly what you might hope they would: a fiendishly clever, funny but appropriately faithful take on a brand that just hasn’t quit since coming into the world as a modest comic book in 1983 from the minds of Peter Laird and Kevin Eastman. Their little creation has spawned countless comics, TV series, all those feature films, video games, toys, bedsheets — you name it. Several...