'POWER RANGERS'......WE MORPH, THEREFORE....WE ARE.

Power Rangers (2017)   Choosing to watch this movie is like choosing the 76 cent generic supermarket brand of paper towels that's sitting in between the $12.99 multi-paks of Bounty.......the price and quality may differ.....but at the end of the day......they're still all paper towels.....

            We couldn't resist having a peek at this one,  bringing up wistful memories of taking our then 9 year old Beloved Daughter to the first official Power Rangers movie back in 1995.....

             Not quite a kinder, gentler age......but back then the theaters weren't glutted with 200 million dollar budgeted Marvel and DC superheroes. And the Power Rangers, based on a Japanese TV series, hit the zeitgeist sweet spot for its target demographic......toddlers to 10 year olds.

             Exactly who the demographic would now be for this bloated update, arriving in the middle of a competitive onslaught of neverending, spandexed CGI circuses.....who knows? 

              More to the point.......who cares?

              We're not here to waste time dumping on the movie......it's a harmless, paint-by-numbers thing, not embarrassingly awful.........but getting back to the paper towel analogy, it suffers from its very generic-ness......Everyone's sat through all this crap before....bigger, better and sometimes funnier.

                There's nothing here that toddlers, kids and fanboys living in their parents' basements haven't seen in dozens and dozens of other comic book movies........and that includes the usual A-List cast member (Elizabeth Banks) enjoying her own Children's Theater hamming as villainess Rita Repulsa......(which, by the way, sounds like a super alternate name for Kellyanne Conway...)

                And this one drags on for an interminable 2 hours, waiting for its five troubled teens to overcome their various angst issues so they can 'morph' into their festively color-coded costumes......

                 If you're still awake for the end, the vast platoons of CGI animators dutifully produce a whole bunch of giant whatevers smashing and crashing into each other.  We're starting to wonder if all those digital artists nod off themselves while they're moving the pixels around to create the same climax we've all seen in every other superhero smackdown.  I swear we can hear them snoring offscreen.......

                 No doubt Haim Saban, the Power Rangers mastermind, dreamed of selling more toys, candy, comic books and action figures.......but found himself and his little plastic heroes all but lost in a modern day marketplace  already stuffed to the rafters with Comic-Con movies.

                Which is why we can morph up only 1 &1/2 stars (* 1/2)  Sorry, Haim.......it's too late to party like it's 1995......