Power Rangers isn’t bad enough to be funny and isn’t good enough to be compelling. It’s not that it doesn’t have parts that work, or good ideas, but none of it comes together into something better. For me this movie fell apart in the final stretch, where all the (admittedly mediocre) character work the movie had been building became pointless and forgotten amid a bunch of frankly garbage CGI action.
This movie is very weird because it’s both cynical about its source material, but also unwilling to actually stray from the cheesy platitudes and formula of a Superhero origin movie.
There’s an edginess the movie wants to have so it does thing like have our five heroes go to the docks to murder Rita. This is a movie where the power of friendship brings someone back to life, but the power of friendship is expressed by variations of the phrase “I would die for you” being said over and over.
This is also a movie where the climax revolves around the villain going to a Krispy Kreme.
There’s so much dumb shit, but it might’ve worked if they leaned into it more. Instead it’s just there. Nothing sums up the problems with this movie for me more than the scene that introduces the Zords: which is just that they’re sitting in a cave being kinda alive, doing nothing. There’s no fanfare, no pomp, no circumstance, they’re just… There.
For me, this movie just totally missed the appeal of Power Rangers. The whole power of this series lies in establishing patterns and then breaking them, very occasionally (The Green Ranger Saga being the big one). To be fair, you can’t really even establish that within a movie. You’d have to play against formula, which this movie just doesn’t. Instead we get an execution on formula that just lacks the iconic staples of Sentai formula, combined with The Breakfast Club. God, the way they use the original theme in the movie is so brief and weak; basically pointless and immediately abandoned for Kanye West’s Power.
I just hate the way the action is staged at the end. With Sentai style action everything is overwrought and overly staged, but edited together like comic panels; Punch, flip, jump, explosion. Here the action is like a stream of mush with wrestling moves and an overuse of slow-motion. It’s just not compelling and it completely undermines the rest of the movie for me, which I was fine with up to then. The story and character stuff is fine (it’s not great) but this is an action franchise, and this movie is completely mindless by the end; that only works if the action is good.
Overall I find this movie to be pretty mediocre, but the action finale is actually trash, undoing the small amount of goodwill I’d worked up for the movie movie up until then. I honestly just don’t even want to talk about the character stuff because by the end of the movie it felt so irrelevant.
