Power Rangers
Oh lord, is this a gritty reboot of a children’s show? I though Fantastic Four killed that, apparently not. No worries, they added masturbation jokes to make it “adult”.
It really is over two hours long, but it’s a glorified TV episode with origin story. The meteor that killed the dinosaurs was an airstrike sent by the good guys as a suicide hit on Rita Repulsa (a plain stupid name). Brian Cranston’s face pulls an Elendil and sacrifices himself to put Sauron to sleep.
Rita Repulsa is evil and wants gold to build a big golem, but she can build unlimited stone golems, why is that not better? Anyway, some kids from high school are attracted to a local quarry for convoluted reasons, and they find some kind of glowing medallions that give them superpowers.
The filmmakers know the suits are stupid, so they remain cynic and in plainclothes for as much as possible. When they “Go Go Power Rangers”, it turns into a bad ripoff of Pacific Rim, with the worst parts Man of Steel thrown into it. Kanye West’s “Power” is used unironically.
The cheese returns when the McGuffin is located just under the product placement fast food chain. It’s worse than Demolition Man.
Besides Elizabeth Banks cashing her check, Brian Cranston’s face (filmed in a booth in one afternoon) and Bill Hader as a stupid robot, the kids are mostly generic actors, they are just stereotypes and type casts.
The only ones I recognise are the typecasts: Naomi “Smile 2” Scott, as the popular cheerleader hot chick, and the dude from Alien: Romulus as a autistic teenage nerd. The fallen-from-grace jock is the leader (pairs up with the hot chick), and the beta couple is the crazy dude, and the shy lesbian girl. The nerd doesn’t need no companion, this is The Breakfast Club.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.