YOU DIDN'T ASK FOR THIS REVIEW OF POWER RANGERS

The Rangers hanging at David Letterman's old Late Nite set YEAR: 2017

Not long ago, once-successful director John Landis's currently working son, Max, wrote CHRONICLE, centering on a group of underdog teenagers gaining superpowers, and one difference between that movie and this one is: these kids really want to be superheroes in order to save the world: But for the mere fact of not using the Paranormal Activity/Blair Witch method of kids videotaping everything that the audience experiences, POWER RANGERS, like Michael Bay's TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES, attempts to turn an extraordinarily dated and embarrassingly campy TV show into brooding, reluctant, ragged heroes liken to the MARVEL franchise; although RANGERS is a lot more like DC given the amount of time for the characters to finally admit — in this case, despite being told over a dozen times by Bryan Cranston's giant "big brother" face in a million-year-old spaceship — that they are in fact very special kids...

Picture Filling Up Space

The plot is basic enough: A thoroughly evil, Gothic and spooky bitch named Rita, once a Ranger and now a villain, wants to destroy the small town where our five heroes spend most of their time in the middle of nowhere, all by themselves... So they think...

Kid's Curve **1/2

In the mountainous gorge where their powers are discovered, the secret must remain there. And, surprisingly enough, this movie ain't all completely worthless... 

Like most Origin Stories, the zeroes become heroes in a semi-intriguing fashion: the small town's limited outskirts harbor a familiar ensemble of young characters including a handsome jock; a computer geek; two pretty tough girls; a resilient outdoorsman; the token mascot in a robotic middleman. And, overall, POWER RANGERS visually reads like the first half of a comic book's Issue #1, lacking the urgency for kids to completely invest in what's going on, which can be rather complicated. On the other hand, for mindless banter and noisy action, you can do a lot worse — like, for instance, the last attempt to bring THE FANTASTIC FOUR to life (ironically helmed by the CHRONICLE director) in which this is THE GODFATHER by comparison.