My Review of 'Power Rangers: 2017 Movie'

I watched this movie a while back and watched it again since my brother hadn't seen it before. Oddly enough, I don't think I reviewed this movie back when I first saw it. The movie was just as I remembered it when I first watched it.

For those that haven't seen the movie, this Power Rangers movie is a retelling of the origins of Power Rangers. There's a great war for a certain crystal and the old Power Rangers back in the day had some in fighting to get the crystal. The team dissipated and ultimately failed. Millions of years later we jump to 2017. Here we meet some familiar names but all with different actors. Well we have to have all new actors since it's always been about high school kids from Angel Grove High School. All of the old names from the original TV show are there.

They all coincidentally meet up when Billy, played by RJ Cyler tries to find artifacts in a mine he and his dad used to excavate. The story is really about the leader Jason, played by Dacre Montgomery. He's the town hero football player. His job is to unite this rag tag group of teenagers and get them to become true friends.

This movie kind of feels more like the Breakfast Club rather than a young adult action flick. It's got a ton of backstory behind each of the characters and they all seem to be pretty diverse. I actually liked that about this movie. I think they put in just the right amount of time into developing each of the characters while balancing the action in-between. Some might argue that there weren't a lot of fight scenes and they would be right. They spent more of the time building the characters and rightly so. Most of the bad guys that they get to fight are just putty men anyways and it could get boring real fast if that's all they did.

I thought that the actors did a great job in portraying each of their characters. Elizabeth Banks who played the villain Rita Repulsa was a bit much but I can tell she was having fun doing it. It kind of felt like she was under different direction than the rest of the cast for the movie. She was wild and over the top whereas the rest of the cast was more subtle even with their jokes.

For those that used to watch the original Power Rangers TV show it's kind of a mixed bag. There's a few Easter eggs in there for you to have fun with but some of the movie is also ruined because you know how Power Rangers work. You know that there's a Megazord and all these other things. You will totally see things coming a mile away. I knew certain things were coming and it was kind of a little torturous the way they prolonged certain scenes that I knew were going to happen.

One really odd thing that happened with this movie was the blatant use of product placement in this movie. Never have I seen a product placement in a movie actually be part a main story driver. It put a really bad taste in my mouth when it happened in the movie and if you watch it you'll know exactly what I mean. If it wasn't for this product placement I think I would have enjoyed this movie much more.

Overall, I still think they did a great job with the movie but there were a few things that took me out of the zone for this one. They did a good job with the character development and the pace of the movie but the product placement and predictability of the movie really had me struggling at points. I will have to give this movie a 7 out of 10. It's a passable movie to kill your time. I actually would like them to make a sequel from this movie. It looked like they were going to do it but we never heard anything since 2017 about this movie.