Power Rangers (2017)

Ohhh, bloody fucking hell. I take one hiatus due to family matters and I come back and this is what you thrust in front of me, Hollywood? This better be worth it.

Yes, indeed, it seems that as if every other toy/cartoon from the 80s/90s is getting a movie, and the one for this week is Power Rangers. Yeah, you know the Power Rangers, color-coded teenage warriors in plastic suits. And also there are some big dinobot type things. You know the ones, you probably grew up with it. I didn't, but I know what it is because everyone talked about it back in the day. So, I'm not really surprised it got a movie, it seems like it's due for a humongous revamp in the eyes of the new youngsters. But you have to do it right for it to work...and it's so easy to fuck it up.

And this...this fucks it up.

Starting with the story. The most generic of generic origin stories. They find some coins which leads them to Bryan Cranston's disembodied head. Cranston gives them some backstory, and Elizabeth Banks is the villain. They gotta train. There's some trouble training. They gonna keep training. Oh no, they're too late, etc. That shit. It's boring, it's half-assed, and it's not inspiring at all. They say they're going to make sequels out of it but I don't know how. And that's not even counting how terribly it's paced and how terrible the screenwriting is. Because oh boy is it terrible.

And then you have the cast. You have five teenage nobodies who do a decent job for a few people who haven't really done this that much, some did better than others, you can't really blame them. But the biggest problem were with the two big names in it: Bryan Cranston and Elizabeth Banks. You have two of the biggest actors, the biggest names for most people right now, and you reduce one to a face in a wall, and you reduce the other to a two-bit villain who just randomly shows up in the middle of the movie. Cranston does seem to give his all, so I'll leave it at that, but Banks's Rita Repulsa is just terrible. She hams up the performance for one, which can be forgiven because sometimes its fun watching big name actors just not care, but the character itself is so, so bad. When your main villain gives me Suicide Squad PTSD, you have a problem.

What else needs to be covered...the direction is bad, fight choreography is choppy and rushed. There's too much reliance on that "zoom and shaky cam" feature that tries and make it seem more realistic. The humor is flat, the side characters are unforgettable. This is just...so bad, and I'm sorry that it turned out this way.

Power Rangers is yet another attempt at rejuvenating an old and nearly forgotten franchise that falls flat on its face with no real substance to make it stand out, and for that, it's getting a 3.9/10. I'm sorry to any and all fans of the franchise if you were expecting something better, but come back in about 20 years when they try it again.