A flabbergastingly misconceived reboot
Quite who thought a graphic joke about ‘‘milking’’ a bull would be a promising start to a Power Rangers film is anyone’s guess (the screenplay is credited to five people). But it sets the tone for what must be the most flabbergastingly misconceived reboot of recent years. Never mind 2015’s Fantastic Four, which became a mangled shadow of its cast and crew’s original intentions en route to the screen. Power Rangers like this on purpose. You sense the film constantly straining to distance itself from the original Mighty Morphin TV series, a trashy but ingenious splice-and-dice job in which scenes of American high-school drama were grafted onto unrelated battle sequences from a long-running Japanese superhero show. (It was an instant hit in 1993, and the franchise has been chugging along lucratively, if less prominently.) The result is a film about heroes in rainbow leotards who battle giant monsters with robot dinosaurs in which an hour and 34 minutes pass before those heroes actually get into their hero costumes and fight a bad guy. The five leads are also wildly irritating, and, despite the heavy stress on their diverse racial backgrounds and quirky personalities, weirdly interchangeable.