Visually uninspiring and punishingly dreary, Power Rangers is definitely not mighty and contains very little actual morphin’.
If asked to describe the popular Power Rangers franchise in one word, most people would probably choose something synonymous with “camp”. Its bright gaiety and tongue-in-cheek shoddiness has a lasting appeal so it’s very disheartening to see the name attached to something so drab and overwrought. The production design is still tacky but not in a knowing way. Powers Rangers could have shot for childish mania and hit its mark easily, instead it aims for a number of different targets and hits none of them. A great many people involved with the production of Power Rangers seem to have been under radically different impressions as to what kind of film they were making.
The screenplay was written for much more charismatic actors than the casting director chose. Director Dean Israelite seems like he wanted to make another attempt at a Transformers/Chronicle hybrid after his, Michael Bay produced, feature debut Project Almanac in 2015 but cinematographer Matthew J. Lloyd shoots a network TV show pilot. Bryan Cranston plays a disembodied alien commander with stony seriousness while Elizabeth Banks’ villain sounds like she’d be more at home entertaining small children at a magic show. She comes the closest, by far, to capturing the original tone of Power Rangers but it’s too little and comes too late into the two hour running time of this computer generated splurge about cosmically powered teenage ninjas; and that’s the real problem. The Power Rangers that you’ll be, presumably, paying to see don’t even show up until about 90 minutes into the film.
Most of your time is spent with a cast of unknowns who you can’t help but feel should have stayed that way. Despite the film’s best effort to spice them up with individual backstories and motivations, teasing ideas as big as autism and struggling with sexual identity, they are all daytime TV cardboard and still commanded by the infallible wisdom and natural leadership skills of the only white man in the group. Power Rangers really didn’t make an effort but it really wants you to think that it did. It also wants you to think of it as being adult. It pushes its censorship-band limits to the edge in terms of swear words and, in that unmistakable faux Michael Bay style, shouts as many crude jokes as it can at you in its off-puttingly unending quest to drag a laugh out of you (the classic “unknowingly milking a bull, thinking it was a cow” joke crops up in the first few minutes).
Power Rangers frequently namedrops the other films that it wants you to compare it to (Iron Man, Transformers) in the mistaken belief that it will appear as anything other than a cheap forgery of them. Say what you like about Michael Bay but he does know how to shoot an action sequence, Israelite struggles to make the most everyday of action film stunts seem above the speed of a trial run. Say what you like about Marvel Studios’ somewhat unfinished looking CGI but they do put their heart and soul into the designs, Power Rangers looks like it either had nowhere near the budget required to make what they set out to make or that it simplified the designs to the most primitive level in order to make the toys cheaper to manufacture.
Power Rangers is out now in cinemas.
