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Power Rangers
STARRING: Dacre Montgomery, Naomi Scott, Bryan Cranston
DIRECTOR: Dean Israelite
Genre: Superhero
Rating: PG-13
124 mins
If you asked a ‘Nineties Kid’ what their favourite TV show growing up was, there’s a fair chance they’d answer with Mighty Morphin Power Rangers.
Unfortunately, I am not one of those. I certainly watched a few episodes, but it never grabbed me like some of its contemporaries did. Maybe it was the fact it was too cheesy and camp, or perhaps it was my general disinterest in superheroes (a genre I’m still not too enamoured with to this day).
Either way, coming back to the franchise two decades later with a more mature outlook (or so I’d like to believe) and a roving critical eye did nothing to change my opinion. This reboot origin story won’t win any new fans, and, in fact, will probably put them off even more, while long-time enthusiasts will find it watchable.
For the first hour, after a prologue that kind of introduces the concept (colour-coded discs that give their owners super powers), we meet our new rangers, though they’re not that, yet.
There’s Jason (Dacre Montgomery), the disillusioned star quarterback injured in a prank gone wrong; Zack (Ludi Lin), the wild card who is also taking care of his sick mother; Trini (Becky G), misunderstood and unhappy; Billy (RJ Cyler), a tech wiz on the autism scale and Kimberly (Naomi Scott), formerly of the bad girls crowd now looking in on it from the outside.
We spend some time with each, and if the stories seem to be plucked from various lower-shelf young-adult novels, well, so be it. After happening upon the discs, much to their surprise, they discover the space ship from the prologue, along with a droid named Alpha 5 and his boss, Zordon (Bryan Cranston), the latter being a kind of spirit embedded in the ship.
Apparently, it’s imperative that they band together to stop Rita Repulsa (Elizabeth Banks), who has been roaming around town eating gold to build a giant monster. I kid you not. Quite how she plans to achieve this is never explained, but I pity the poor soul who stumbles across that lavatory during an archaeological dig.
The main problem with the film is that director Dean Israelite doesn’t know what tone to go for. There’s a question every piece of intellectual property needs to ask itself before a new version is made: How seriously should we treat the source material?
In the case of Power Rangers, which used to air on Saturday mornings and cobbled together shameless merchandising goals, dubbed Japanese action footage and sanitised high school shenanigans, they went mostly serious.
If the plot synopsis didn’t indicate that was a terrible idea, then the action sequences would. Made up of mostly bog-standard CGI and a few sequences seemingly rescued from the cutting room floor of Michael Bay’s Transformers (the bottom of the deepest barrel), this is dire stuff that should have gone for the lowest common denominator from the off, artistic credibility be damned.
In fact, it’s telling that Banks is the best part of the movie as Rita. She snivels and sneers with campy glee under the pounds of zombie makeup as she fiendishly terrorises some engagement ring shoppers at a jewellery store like she’s the only one who understands what movie she’s in.
That’s the tone that should have been established, buying into the same aesthetic as the TV series. Israelite spends an hour trying to dig into the whiny teenage angst of its leads while all the fans want is to see his colourful neon punch-ups. It is either an attempt to display the patience of Job or the complete misreading of his audience.
So inevitably, by the time the Power Rangers figure out how to morph, you’re already looking for a way to morph out of the cinema.
Showing in: Cineco, Seef I, Saar, Al Jazira, Wadi Al Sail
Rating: 2/5
