Now comes with a creamy custard center. Mmmmm. Eat our f**king donuts!

Bet you never expected to see a review of the Power Rangers film on Ooh Sometimes did you? OK, those of you who follow Twitter and all that, would have been expecting this a long time ago actually! But there’s a good reason why this is now featured here. First of all, who saw the trailer for the new Power Rangers and actually thought, hang on, this doesn’t actually look that bad? I suspect it’s going to be a good number of you as remarkably the trailer showed a lot of changes.

The kids were more grounded. It was to be an origin story for once that would make 3% sense. The music was much more subdued and atmospheric. The effects were not just two guys in rubber monster suits pretending to hit each other. They also only hinted at what the new Rangers would look like too. It was all you would want in a marketing campaign to reboot a franchise that’s been going for decades at this point. That alone made me curious.

I watched a few of the Power Rangers shows when I was tiny, but honestly it passed me by even then. I just remember the terrible fight scenes where the rangers looked like they were having random fits they couldn’t control and they were hitting crap monsters and they were falling over even when they weren’t hit. The bad guys would be better off in Pantomime honestly, such was the level of cheese and silliness!

But for this first in what the producers clearly hope will be a long running film series as well as the TV series ongoing, things are being played differently. It’s set in a crap town that’s still called Angel Grove from the TV series and over time we see different kids turn up, all thankfully covering all races just in case they were to insult anyone. After Jason (Darce Montgomery) gets into trouble something involving a school’s cow……yeah….he’s stuck one day in detention. He meets Billy (RJ Cyler) and Kimberly (Naomi Scott) which is err….jolly good.

This of course leads Jason and Billy going off to a gold mine to blow a hole in a wall where others turn up to (basically all the other kids were around the mine as well) and they pick up some coins that get blown out from the wall. The next day, they notice they can break stuff and are uber strong. So of course they go back to the mine to see what else was there and that’s where we finally meet a little robot dude with a bowlhead, and Brian Cranston stuck as a floating head on a wall called Zordon.

Are you…Are you the new employee at Krispy Kreme?

As time rolls on, the big baddie they have to defeat comes into play, known only as Rita Repulsa (played by Elizabeth Banks). We saw her briefly at the very beginning of the film where she was being a bit of a tw*t to Zordon to put it mildly. But now she’s going round, collecting gold and making our plucky rangers miserable. As you can imagine, it does build up to an epic battle where oversized things fight each other along with incredibly cheesy Power Rangers music. Oh, I wonder who wins…..

Now you may have noticed in the title image as well as the captions, that Krispy Kreme is mentioned a couple of times. That’s because that is the site of the major battle in the film. In one of the worst examples of product placement ever pushed on anyone, the mcguffin they have to protect to save the world, is buried under the town’s only Krispy Kreme store. I shit you not. They even have Rita Repulsa take some time out to eat a f**king donut while her big bad guy smashes stuff outside. Seriously, there’s selling out and then there’s just getting bent over the desk to take it.

So now the donut in the room has been addressed, what else can I remark on? Well the story isn’t too bad, even if the reasons why certain things happen make about as much sense as Sean Spicer. The way the kids actually have to become friends, to care about each other in order to become the fighting force we probably wanted to see, is actually a neat way of developing them as characters. The fact that Zordon wasn’t more holy than the pope too was a nice change and added a different take on the character which was welcome. Brian Cranston however I suspect was just using his Breaking Bad acting as I kept waiting for him to say “I’m the one who knocks”

Elizabeth Banks clearly was having fun in the role of Rita, and yes, you won’t be able to hold back the smiles when the over the top cheesy as f*ck Power Rangers Theme Tune plays as they race into battle. It’s never going to be a masterpiece but remarkably, it wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be.

So would I recommend you all to wander down to the big screen to see this? If you’re not going to watch Guardians of the Galaxy 2 this coming weekend, then sure? It’s not a bad film and the budget does indeed elevate it above the usual meh. Some time and care went into this and it does show. Now granted, it’s clear sequel bait at the end and I imagine they will go further in Power Rangers 2. Should that happen, remarkably, I wouldn’t be upset.