Power Rangers (2017)

Power Rangers (2017)

IMDB Rating :

High school outcasts stumble upon an old alien ship, where they acquire superpowers and are dubbed the Power Rangers. Learning that an old enemy of the previous generation has returned to exact vegenance, the group must harness their powers and use them to work together and save the world.

Director: Dean Israelite

Writers: John Gatins (screenplay), Matt Sazama (story by)

Stars: Dacre Montgomery, Naomi Scott, RJ Cyler

PG-13 | 2h 4min | Action, Adventure, Sci-Fi

 Read IMDB review Here

Movie rating ★☆☆☆☆  

 Sadistic, ugly and incompetent, this reboot is even worse than The Fantastic Four

The Power Rangers are sexting, if you’re wondering what they’re up to nowadays. They’re slut-shaming too. They’re also talking about inserting crayons into bodily orifices and pleasuring farmyard animals. If you think that last one’s an exaggeration, buy a ticket. Five minutes in, you’ll come face to ashen face with the all-mooing, all-hoof-stomping truth.

Quite who thought a graphic joke about "milking" a bull would be a promising start to a Power Rangers film is anyone’s guess (the screenplay is credited to five different people). But there’s no doubt it sets the tone for what must be the most flabbergastingly misconceived reboot of recent years. Never mind 2015’s Fantastic Four, which became a mangled shadow of its cast and crew’s original intentions en route to the screen. Power Rangers may actually be like this on purpose.

One too-brief burst of the theme tune aside, you sense the film constantly straining to distance itself from the original Mighty Morphin TV series, a trashy but ingenious splice-and-dice job in which scenes of American high-school drama were grafted onto unrelated battle sequences from a long-running Japanese superhero show. (It was an instant hit in 1993, and the franchise has been chugging along lucratively, if less prominently, ever since.)

Clearly, the blueprint for a new film version should have been Pacific Rim, Guillermo del Toro’s energised, joyous, multi-coloured kaiju smackdown from 2013. But instead Power Rangers seems to desperately want to be Chronicle, the downbeat, meandering cult superhero thriller from 2012, directed by Fantastic Four’s Josh Trank.

There’s a kind of logic in Lionsgate handing directing duties to Dean Israelite, whose slight but charming 2015 debut, Project Almanac, unapologetically positioned itself as Chronicle with a time machine – and a John Hughesian detention scene even positions them as Breakfast Club-like outcasts, united in adversity. But it’s impossible to fathom why the studio decided that’s what they wanted in the first place.

The five leads are also wildly irritating, and, despite the heavy stress on their diverse racial backgrounds and quirky personalities, weirdly interchangeable. Now and again the film cuts away to the activities of Rita Repulsa (Elizabeth Banks), a witch from outer space who’s terrorising the residents of Angel Grove in her ongoing hunt for the Zeo Crystal.

In one of a number of scenes that may traumatise nostalgic millennials, let alone the show’s primary-school-aged core audience, Rita is seen tearing out a tramp’s teeth in silhouette. (There’s also some cod-orgasmic moaning, usually while she’s being engulfed by slime or bristles.)

An even halfway competent action finale might have made up for much of the above. But the ugly and incomprehensible big finish we get appears to have been shot by the Hunchback of Notre Dame and edited by a monkey wearing oven gloves, and if there’s a single clear shot of the Dinozords in action in there, I must have missed it.

Read full review at Telegraph

Twenty years after the last Power Rangers theatrical release, the sci-fi series returns with an updated visual style and reconfigured storyline, as the Saban Entertainment property moves from 20th Century Fox to Lionsgate. Unlike the TV program (still running after 24 seasons), the feature films faded away after 1997's Turbo: A Power Rangers Movie, the follow-up to Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: The Movie, released two years earlier.

The current version creatively reimagines the Power Rangers' origins by establishing them as a team of intergalactic protectors, which certainly provides a high degree of flexibility for potential future iterations. However, a proliferation of memorable teen action-adventure movies have solidified their own loyal followings over the past two decades, leaving the impression that a revived Power Rangers franchise may lack the distinction necessary to sustain a full-fledged relaunch, although its worldwide appeal should assure satisfactory initial results.

For longtime fans, the newest installment preserves some of the most beloved characteristics of the original franchise, updated to reflect technological advances. The Rangers' color-coded power suits now benefit from nanoparticle properties and the robotic mecha assault vehicles known as Zords that they pilot take on enhanced battle capabilities, while Rita's menacing sidekicks the Putties and the gigantic warrior Goldar get more polished, fluid CGI representations. (And yes, the "Go Go Power Rangers" theme song makes a triumphant return.)

Screenwriter John Gatins succeeds in effectively distilling the Power Rangers' sprawling mythology into a manageable scope and dialing back the campy humor and martial arts fixations that characterized the TV series and liberally informed the feature films. The current version instead emphasizes more realistic dramatic situations by imbuing each Ranger with some type of personal issue.

Standing out in a field of largely emerging young talent, Cyler (Me and Earl and the Dying Girl) strikes a heartfelt balance between Billy's obsessive and creative tendencies, playing them against one another for both humor and emotional impact. Cranston as the pompous alien with unrealistic expectations and Hader as the ever-optimistic robot form a resourceful if unexpected comedic team, but can't quite match Banks for Rita's sheer campiness (even if she appears practically unrecognizable under layers of makeup and prosthetics).

Israelite, building on his experience with teen sci-fi feature Project Almanac, orchestrates a vastly more complex array of characters, action set pieces and technical resources for a combined effect that maintains dramatic tension even while teetering on the brink of excess. CGI characters and special effects sequences by Weta Workshop and a variety of other companies are seamlessly integrated and consistently thrilling.

Read full review at Hollywood Reporter.

A 'Batman Begins'-Style Reboot That Works

At the cost of around $110 million-$120 million, there is obviously a lot riding on this one.

Dean Israelite’s Power Rangers does make some of the mistakes found in less successful origin story reboots, mainly in spending too much time getting to what audiences came to see. But it does work as an engaging teen coming-of-age drama, a kind of Breakfast Club-meets-Chronicle mash-up that turns into Pacific Rim in the third act. Maybe the movie shouldn’t work, but it more or less does. It is also rooted in a nostalgia for a time when movies like this were less commonplace.

Yes, this is a comparatively grimdark variation on the 24-year television show. The mood is somber, and the color palette is morose, which makes the costumes and related toys stand out that much brighter. The fantastical prologue makes a point to show a dying Ranger crawling through mud, water and blood as a villain makes his last stand. It works as both a “This isn’t your little brother’s Power Rangers” statement and a meta-commentary on Joseph Kahn’s satirical and ultraviolent Power Rangers short film that “won the Internet” for a few days two years ago. But once the story starts in earnest, we realize that Saban and friends are very much trying to make a Power Rangers movie in the vein of Chris Nolan’s Batman Begins.

It is no secret that the demographic makeup of many a Power Rangers season would be considered “progressive” by today’s standards. Even though the lone white male member gets to be the leader, this big-budget variation maintains that tradition. The team, as previously noted, is made up of two women, one black actor, one Asian actor, a mixed-race actress and a Hispanic actress (all of whom are fine actors). Arguably just as important, John Gatins’ screenplay (with a story by Matt Sazama, Burk Sharpless, Michele Mulroney and Kieran Mulroney) puts one of our heroes “on the spectrum” while outing one of them as explicitly gay. The film doesn’t dwell on any of this, but our heroes are a truly diverse group of kids in more ways than one.

While casting Bryan Cranston as Zordon was a nice in-joke, said movie star gets too much screen time and an entire arc that brings the film down right when it should be racing toward the finish. There are too many scenes in the underground cave where Zordon delivers doomsday exposition, while Bill Hader’s talking robot provides kid-friendly comic relief. Elizabeth Banks is terrifying as Rita Repulsa. The film earns its PG-13 via her grotesque appearance, unapologetic menace and (mostly offscreen) body count. Yes, this is a Power Ranger movie that talks about gruesome serial killings, but I would have flipped for that when I was 10 in the same way we now worship The Monster Squad.

As someone with no strong feelings for the Power Rangers franchise (I hated it as a kid and came to appreciate its charms as a parent), this is an interesting attempt to craft a grounded and character-driven adaptation, one that successfully blends genre with larger-than-life superhero spectacle. At its best, Power Rangers is a throwback to the likes of Masters of the Universe and the first Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie. It’s from a time when getting a darker, more serious big-budget feature based on your favorite kid-friendly property, one that felt like a real film, was a rare and splendid thing.

Read full review at Forbes

Movie rating ★★☆☆☆  

Colour-coded superpowers revealed in goofy origins story

You can rationalise and contextualise and say that the Marvel effect means any Lycra-clad saviour with an iota of brand recognition is now apt for revival in some format. Once the lights dim, however, nothing can prepare you for the ontological strangeness of watching a Power Rangers movie in 2017. Especially one that is – forgive me if my voice rises an octave here – not entirely terrible? That is, in fact, basically harmless, if you don’t object to feeding your kids pop-cultural leftovers, with odd flickers of charm besides? In an age of hype, some films are bound to benefit from massively reduced expectations; this would be one of them.

Being a 21st century reboot, of course, director Dean Israelite’s hands are tied by the deadening demands of the origin story, yet this remains one of the goofier ones, chortlingly realised: five small-town kids assuming colour-coded superpowers after trapping themselves beneath a slough of prehistoric alien space rock. If the group’s trajectory from detention through training montage to final, city-trashing battle is diagrammatic, Israelite senses it’s silly enough not to belabour the throwaway plot points generated.

No one is pushing the subvert button too hard: the much-reported gay subtext proves so muted as to make Beauty and the Beast seem like Paris Is Burning. Nevertheless, those leftfield choices Israelite does make (bovine masturbation gags, batty product-placement, Elizabeth Banks vamping as cosplay-ready villain Rita Repulsa) are welcome, and the New Rangers such likable types it’s a pity they should eventually suit up. We didn’t really need any of this: not the repackage, nor more superheroics, nor the closing-credits cover of Snap’s The Power. Yet the film achieves a functioning mediocrity we perhaps might have thought beyond this franchise, offering a modicum of diversion in return for the cash disappeared from your wallet.

Read full review at The Guardian

Movie rating ★★☆☆☆  

Painfully slow, uninsightful comic-book silliness

A kids' adventure show that briefly became a pop culture phenomenon in the 1990s, the original Mighty Morphin Power Rangers was a reworking of Japan's long-running Super Sentai, combining dubbed action sequences – with the characters' faces conveniently hidden behind colourful helmets – and new footage featuring an American cast.

What Kahn treated as a joke, Dean Israelite (Project Almanac) plays mostly straight in his new Power Rangers, which sets out to be all things to all viewers and winds up achieving considerably less than Josh Trank's unfairly maligned Fantastic Four movie did with a roughly similar plot.

Just now, the door is open for some filmmaker to score a smash hit by fusing this sort of fantasy-adventure with the close observation of modern teenage life found in something like Kelly Fremon Craig's The Edge of Seventeen.

Unfortunately, Israelite is not that filmmaker: even when his heroes sit around and bare their souls to each other, he seems less interested in fresh insight than in paying tribute to The Breakfast Club.

The only member of the central quintet with much personality is Billy Cranston (RJ Cyler), a vulnerable geek with a range of compulsions and a gift for electronics.

Billy accounts for his oddities by explaining that he is "on the spectrum", and the portrait does manage to subvert the stereotype of people with autism as cold fish – even if Israelite and his writers still seem unsure how far it's acceptable to play the condition for laughs.

Read full review at Sydney Morning Herald