★★
(M) 124 minutes
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.
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A group of high-school students stumble across a space ship, and in doing so are given super powers with which they must save the world.
This might not seem a promising starting point for a 2017 blockbuster. Indeed, only a couple of years ago the prankster director Joseph Kahn satirised the whole "reboot" craze with an internet short film that purported to imagine what a dark and edgy interpretation would look like.
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.
Set in the nondescript small town of Angel Grove, the film moves with painful slowness through its ritualised origin story, following five misfit teenagers as they get to know each other, acquire superpowers, and learn of their destiny as protectors of the universe from their alien mentor Zordon (Bryan Cranston), who must train them to "morph" into their alternate, costumed selves.
In the process, the film itself morphs from relatively realistic teen soap opera – often shot handheld – to comic-book silliness once the team are suited up and pitted against an army of rock monsters led by alien witch Rita Repulsa (Elizabeth Banks, in a performance of pure screechy camp).
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.
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