Metacritic reviews

Israelite, building on his experience with teen sci-fi feature Project Almanac, orchestrates a vastly more complex array of characters, action set pieces and technical resources for a combined effect that maintains dramatic tension even while teetering on the brink of excess.

Most movies like Power Rangers get the first-half Y.A. character stuff wrong and the second-half smashy-smashy action stuff right. This one does just the reverse.

Power Rangers is baloney through and through, but as baloney goes, it’s better than you might expect. It packs enough zing to make you forgive the origin-story clichés. And the predictable save-the-world stuff. And the insanely ubiquitous product placement.

We’re now so awash in superhero culture that kids no longer need the safe, lame, pandering junior-league version of it. They can just watch “Ant-Man” or the PG-13 “Suicide Squad.” Safe, lame, and pandering have all grown up.

The last half hour is filled with cheeseball visual effects, B-movie monsters and Banks — by far the most enjoyable aspect — hamming it up the best she can.

There’s an admirable commitment to absurdity, yet it belies the thoughtful coming-of-age journey for the five teens up until they hit “morphin time.”

For all of its surprising relevance, Power Rangers feels hopelessly lost in time. There is an audience for this movie, but this movie has no idea who that audience might be.

The film achieves a functioning mediocrity we perhaps might have thought beyond this franchise, offering a modicum of diversion in return for the cash disappeared from your wallet.

A teen group therapy session disguised as a superhero movie, Power Rangers is numbingly predictable and cynically made, recycling myriad blockbuster tropes but draining their adolescent pleasures in the process.

The ugly and incomprehensible big finish we get appears to have been shot by the Hunchback of Notre Dame and edited by a monkey wearing oven gloves, and if there’s a single clear shot of the Dinozords in action in there, I must have missed it.