Review of Power Rangers (2017) by Spangle — 26 Oct 2017

Chopped, cut, pasted, and slapped together by a committee of folks studying the latest results from a test screening, Dean Israelite's take on Power Rangers is everything a Power Rangers film should be. It is still rather bad, but it is fun with a child-like silliness that lets the audience know the events of the film are hardly serious. I mean, hell, how serious can one expect a film about a villain named Rita Repulsa (Elizabeth Banks) and her plans to create a monster out of gold named Goldar to dig out a crystal that gives life to Earth, which happens to be hidden under a Krispy Kreme? Power Rangers is dumb and poorly written, but is somehow fun to watch in a really immature way. Fortunately, that is exactly what Power Rangers always was since it was first created.

The first act and beginning of the second act is really where the film has most of its fun as the rangers meet for the first time, beginning bonding, and getting to know one another. While it can be a bit cheesy and silly at times, the scenes of them bonding instill the film with this great light and goofy edge that keeps the proceedings moving ahead with a chaotic energy. None of these moments are particularly revolutionary, but they are greatly endearing to the titular heroes and allows the audience to really get a hold on all of the characters and their backgrounds. By the time they begin to discover they have new superpowers, Power Rangers manages to show great constraint. Initially, the kids are just shocked and slowly realize what powers they have. With a fun scene where they all put their colored coins on a table at the lunch line which causes all lunches to explode due to the power in the coins, the film keeps its fun energy going and avoids exposition at the very onset of their power. The film instead shows us some of the neat tricks, the strength they have, and laces the film itself with some decent mystery as to what is going on with these kids.

Unfortunately, this all ends when they find the spaceship with hologram Zordon (Bryan Cranston) and the robot Alpha 5 (Bill Hader). Ignoring the fact that Alpha 5 literally cannot shut up, the film rapidly turns into an exposition machine as Zordon explains who Rita Repulsa is, what she wants, what they means for the Earth, and what she did to his team. The dialogue also gets appallingly on-the-nose at this point. For example, Zordon sends the kids to train in the pit. The film then cuts to Alpha 5 walking into the pit and saying, "So, this is the pit." This horror continues with on-the-nose exposition-filled dialogue throughout the film. Scenes of the kids just coming out and explaining their inner feelings and Rita Repulsa never beating around the bush and always taking the time to remind Goldar she wants to find the crystal under Krispy Kreme. Where the film is not on-the-nose, it becomes annoyingly dense. Acting like a child who has a secret that everybody knows but they continue to pretend nobody knows, Power Rangers tries to build to the rangers morphing by making it a mystery as to how it is achieved. When Billy (RJ Cyler) briefy morphs when defending his friends, the entire crew acts shocked and asks him how he morphed. For the next few scenes, this charade continues with far too many lines of dialogue able to be summed up as, "Woah dude how did you do that? We have the figure out how to morph." By the time the film reaches its sentimental and sappy moments of the rangers swearing they would die for each other, the film has reached its absolute peak of annoyance. Had the film just let the kids morph far sooner, the film could have been shorter, yet it instead opts to obnoxiously beat around the bush and pretend the audience is too stupid to figure out the key to this "secret".

The final battle between the Power Rangers and Rita Repulsa is similarly horrifically written with the dialogue just highlighting exactly what will happen. Rita tells Goldar to push them into a pit, followed by Goldar pushing them into a pit. Jason (Dacre Montgomery) tells another ranger to throw a punch, so they throw a punch. It is team work, yes, but it is annoying. The film cannot help but tell us what is coming next by dedicating line-after-line to the exactly that pursuit. It is a film that trusts its audience so little that it feels the need to just let them know what is about to happen so they can brace themselves for it to happen. When the rangers fall in the aforementioned pit and come out as a single being, Rita Repulsa's reaction of, "How can they do that?!" is horrible and ignores the fact that she was once a ranger and is literally about to step inside Goldar in a similar way. The dialogue in this film feels written for a five-year-old and, as a by-product, it just feels lazy, mashed together, and just stilted. This is a film about a group of teenagers fighting a being called Rita Repulsa, yet the film feels the need to spoon-feed every bit of information to the audience.