Power Rangers Review: 7 Ups & 4 Downs

2. The Tone Is Totally Uneven

The marketing for Power Rangers had made it really tough to figure out what tone the final film would strike. Is it a gritty, self-serious reboot aimed at the teen crowd? Or is it a goofy love letter to fans of the original series?

The answer, really, is both, and the result is a film that doesn't always reconcile those two tones. Often the film is a gritty, but actually relatively involving, drama, and at a moment's notice a joke or Rita's campy antics will emerge out of nowhere, creating a tonal whiplash of sorts.

For instance, the film opens with an incredible flashback sequence to Rita battling Zordon (Bryan Cranston), and this is immediately followed by a present-day gag where Jason (Dacre Montgomery) manually masturbates a bull and wrongly believed he was in fact milking a cow's udder.

This permeates throughout, and while it's hardly the death of the movie because it doesn't push the serious too hard (and the drama is weirdly good), there's definitely a feeling that the film was pushed and pulled in several directions by several different voices during writing, shooting and editing.