Power Rangers

Dir: Dean Israelite

2017

**

I was a little too old for Power Rangers when it first popped up on British television. I remember my younger sister watching it on Saturday mornings when I was leaving the house to go to my Saturday job. I’m a huge nerd, I love a bit of sci-fi and have always wondered whether Power Rangers would have been my thing, had I been a couple of years younger. I see many of the original cast members at sci-fi conventions and I seem to be one of the few people not queuing up to meet them and I have always had the feeling that I missed out on something. I have not watched a single episode of any of the franchises incarnations and I haven’t seen either of the previous feature length outings; 1993’s Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: The Movie or 1997’s Turbo: A Power Rangers Movie, although I’ve seen bits of the original series and I sort of understand what it is all about. It’s a reworked show that reused loads of footage from a popular Japanese superhero show called Super Sentai. It’s the sort of cheap shot that b-movies had been doing for years, except this was TV aimed at kids. To be fair, it was all about the toys but it’s clearly very popular and if I’m being honest, a made-for-TV b-movie rip off of an old Japanese show is exactly the sort of thing I want to see. I don’t think anyone took the concept seriously, they enjoyed it for what it was and enjoyed it more so for what it really was. I don’t think the people in charge of the remake really understood this. The 2017 reboot is a very strange mixture of far too serious and far too comical. I’m not a fan of the original and I didn’t enjoy this, I would imagine though that an old school fan would have been utterly disgusted with what they’ve done with their beloved franchise, indeed, a younger friend of mine who is a hard-core fan told me he doesn’t consider it a true Power Rangers film due to it missing the characters Bulk and Skull. Answers on a postcard. It boasts that it is the first superhero film to feature a homosexual and someone with Autism, which is great, but it is also the first superhero film to begin with a joke about masturbating a bull. It goes from an Alien war, to the extinction of the dinosaurs, to masturbating a bull, to the longest, most vomit-inducing car crash scene I have ever witnessed. If any of that sounds intriguing, and I can see that it could be, don’t be fooled. It’s dreadful. Such a shame really, it trivialises the two big firsts really, although the film is so bad I’m not sure anyone is really bothered by it or offended. The Rangers themselves are a strange mix of adult and child, I still can’t get my head around someone being old enough to drive a powerful automobile who is still young enough not to escape detention. The producers have cited Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man series and John Hughes’ classic 80s movie The Breakfast Club. Raimi’s Spider-Man wasn’t perfect but it is a masterpiece in comparison and the only thing that Power Rangers has in common with one of the best kid’s films of a golden decade is that the kids all meet in detention. The Rangers have labels rather than personalities, they’re lazy stereotypes, not real people – not generally a problem in silly action sci-fi movies but it is when the film makers have clearly gone out of the their way in trying. Max Landis was one of the film’s original writers but was fired. He complained that the first trailer for the film looked incredibly like Chronicle, a film he wrote some years before. I can’t help but agree. I didn’t much like Chronicle but it was very popular, I like what it did with the genre and the new Power Rangers film was clearly influenced by it. From what I can tell, they’ve stripped the soul away from the original, made the colours a little darker, added CGI and an inappropriate level of seriousness. Don’t get me started on the Krispy Kreme product placement. I hope the trend of turning bright and fun old television shows into dark, brooding and miserable films ends soon. Maybe it’s time to do the opposite, I don’t know, but I think I’d rather have Prison Break the Musical or Hill Street Blues on Ice than this nonsense.