So far, on this Christmas Day, I have posted three reviews for films that featured plots that made little to no sense to me.  Well, here’s a fourth one.

Power Rangers is a cinematic reboot of the old Mighty Morphin Power Rangers television show from the 90s.  It deals with five teenagers who meet in detention and, though a series of events that I really don’t feel like wasting my time recounting, end up in an old gold mine where they find five coins, which allow them to turn into … well, I guess they’re Power Rangers.

There’s Jason (Dacre Montgomery), who was a star football player until he stole a car as part of a prank and ended up crashing it.  (The initial car crash is entirely filmed inside the automobile, which adds some deceptive excitement to the film.)  And then there’s Kimberly (Naomi Scott), who is the mean girl who actually has a good heart.  She’s in detention because she’s a cyber bully.  Billy (RJ Cyler) is the genius, which means that he’s the type of socially awkward student who accidentally blows up his locker.  And then there’s Trini (Becky G) and Zack (Ludi Lin), who are both just kind of there.  Every good group of three has to have two extra people to get in the way and that’s pretty much the function of Trini and Zack.

Anyway, after they discover the Power Coins and share a few moments that feel as if they were lifted from Chronicle, the new Power Rangers are trained by a robot named Alpha 5 (Bill Hader) and a former Power Ranger named Zordon (Bryan Cranston) who died at around the same time as the dinosaurs.  Apparently, finding the power coins has allowed the ancient evil of Rita Repulsa (Elizabeth Banks) to be reborn and now she’s threatening to destroy either Earth or the universe.  Actually, I was never quite sure what Rita was trying to do.  But the Power Rangers have to set aside their differences, learn to work as a team, and come together to defeat her.

Or something like that.  Honestly, this film featured a lot of exposition about people with names like Zordon and Rita Repulsa and Goldar and my eyes pretty much glazed over while I was trying to listen to it all.  Listen, I am a fidget spinner-carrying member of the Severe ADHD Club.  The minute they started explaining the lengthy history of the Power Rangers, my mind pretty much started looking for anything else to focus on.  It would have been different if the film has some sort of epic scope or if it made it look like it would actually be fun to be a Power Ranger.  Instead, it just turned into another franchise-opening action film.  Basically, it felt like The Fantastic Four movie, with one extra member of the team.

I should admit that I’ve never seen an episode of Mighty Morphin Power Rangers.  Perhaps if I had, I would have gotten more out of this movie.  The five actors playing the Power Rangers are all talented and charismatic and I look forward to seeing what they do in the future.  But this confusing mess of a movie just left me with a headache.