Stupid Movie Reviews: Power Rangers

It’s only the second week of Stupid Movie Reviews, and already I can see what the recurring theme of this column is going to be.  

“How the Hell did anyone think that this would be a good idea for a movie?”

To be fair, there was a certain amount of fanfare circling this movie’s announcement.  Plenty of folks, mostly younger than myself, have fond memories of the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers TV show.  It’s run for a long, long time and has built a dedicated fanbase.  The 1995 movie of the same name was largely successful in playing off many of the show’s tropes on a bigger stage with a bigger budget, and it even featured the show’s long-running American TV protagonists.  So the idea that some studio somewhere could reboot the property for the modern age wasn’t too far out of the box--certainly not in the age of the Transformers franchise.  Then they cast Elizabeth Banks as Rita Repulsa and Bryan Cranston as Zordon, and I think even very casual fans (like my kids and me) were ready to give this thing a look.

But even with all that, this is damnably strange execution.

The original show was about five friends who became superheroes.  The new version is The Breakfast Club with an exceedingly cheap superhero movie smashed onto its superstructure.  And even that might’ve worked if the movie’s special effects didn’t look quite so bad.

We open with Jason (Dacre Montgomery) the soon-to-be Red Ranger pulling a stupid high school football prank that will get him thrown off the team and sequestered in Saturday detention.  This in a season in which college scouts were coming to look at his arm.  That makes him this movie’s Andrew Clark (Emilio Estevez), and it’s immediately weird to see him set up as the team’s leader.  But, of course, he meets most of his team in Saturday detention.  This includes Kimberly Hart, the Pink Ranger (Naomi Scott), in the Molly Ringwald role and Billy Cranston (RJ Cyler), the Blue Ranger, in the Anthony Michael Hall role.  Spoiler alert, impulsive, self-centered jocks don’t often make good leaders, and so it is that these three decide to explore an abandoned mine shaft--with Billy’s case of old blasting caps in tow.  The ensuing explosion catches the rest of the team quite by accident--including YouTube star Becky G as the Yellow Ranger in the Ally Sheedy role and Zack Taylor as the Black Ranger in a very watered down version of Judd Nelson’s iconic rebel without a clue.  Can these five come together to form a legitimate team in time to stop Rita Repulsa?

To be honest, I thought all of this worked reasonably well.  It was clear from the previews that this movie was always meant to follow a lot of The Breakfast Club story beats, but those beats work.  Granted, we never really find out why these kids feel alienated; a lot of their stupid decisions boil down to that iconic teenage defense, “I don’t know why I did it.”  But I bought it.  And when Banks shows up as Repulsa to torture the team, we feel their collective response.  It makes sense that they come together at last.  I don’t know if it’s art, but it’s decent mid-grade cinema, at least.

What’s harder to stomach is the execution of the rest of the movie.  The original Mighty Morphin Power Rangers made extensive use of martial arts choreography, and if the effects were cheap, we understood that most of that stuff was lifted from old cut-rate Japanese TV.  In this movie, though, the spots are ridiculous, martial arts isn’t even hinted at despite an extensive training montage in which we watched our heroes learn to fight, and the robots and whatnot all look, well, plastic.  I mean, this is not Pacific Rim.  It’s not even one of the later Transformers films.  And in a $100M reboot, they needed to do better.  The expectation was higher.  Much higher.  In fact, the 1995 version of this same concept looked decidedly better than does the new one, which came almost twenty years later.

 

And that’s where and why this movie falls apart.  It gets so bad that’s it’s laugh-out-loud funny in a decidedly unintentional way, and boy, that is a shame.  My kids and I liked about the first two-thirds of this movie, but the end is just not good.  

Hard pass.  I’m sorry to say it, but this isn’t worth your time, even on a lazy Saturday with your children.