Review: Power Rangers Is Far Better Than It Has Any Right To Be.
- Mar 23, 2017
- 2 min read
I've never seen Power Rangers. Little bits here and there but never a whole episode and never in context so its safe to say I went to see 2017's Power Rangers film almost entirely blind. I knew the source material was super campy and can't say I was expecting much. What I got was...unexpected. to say the least.
Jason (Dacre Montgomery) is your typical star high school football players that winds up in detention for doing stupid stuff. Here he meets Billy (RJ Cyler), a total nerd with a knack for all thing technological. Together they wind up at an abandoned gold mine along with three other kids from there detention, none of whom have met before. After they find five strange coloured coins and are hit by a train while escaping the mines security, they find themselves safe in bed, with super-powers bestowed upon them. They strong, fast and can leap great distances.But soon enough they discover they are part of something much bigger than themselves and are set a task. To save the world from a vengeful enemy. To do so they must become, The Power Rangers.
Power Rangers isn't a good movie. In fact, the first hour and a half of this two hour movie is incredibly boring. There's some decent character development, the usual superhero origin cliches and way to much talking for a show inspired by multicoloured spandex wearer fighting people in monster suits. But the last half hour makes for some of the most enjoyable cinema around. To say things get ridiculous would be putting it lightly.
Bryan Cranston, an Oscar nominated, Emmy Award winning actor plays a wall. If you thought it couldn't get better than that, you were wrong. There's some genuinely good laughs scattered throughout the mind numbing first three quarters but when a team of heroes, each wearing colourful armour, climb into equally stylish robots and duke it out with an army of rock-men and a giant gold birdman, its difficult to hate it. The villain, one Rita Repulsa (Elizabeth Banks) is so ridiculously outrageous that she elevates every scene she's in, clearly bringing the campy tones of the TV show to what is a mostly serious film.
If you really want to watch Power Rangers go ahead. It's not a perfect film but the last half hour alone is worth the price of admission, provided you're willing to sit through all the boring parts that come before it. But its almost certainly worth it to see a ridiculous premise come to fruition on a scale never seen before. I for one, will be watching the inevitable sequel.
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