Power Rangers

Okay, so it's always a challenge to reboot something.  It's even more of a challenge to reboot something that's considered a classic piece of pop culture.  It's even more of a challenge to reboot a classic piece of pop culture when the source material is pretty lame.  C'mon, admit it, as a kid the Power Rangers were pretty cool, but the source material really isn't that great when you go back and look at it as an adult.  The characters, story, catch phrases, and more fall squarely in the category of completely and utterly cheesy.  It's not an entirely bad thing, but it's not exactly a masterpiece of true brilliance in any respect (except in merchandizing, you know you still have a couple plastic Power Ranger figurines hiding somewhere).
So, to get to the point, when I heard there was to be a reboot film of the franchise, I was mostly surprised, but also a little curious about what they were planning to do to make it actually still feel cool, even though all the Power Ranger fans of old are now in their 20's and 30's.  Well, not too long ago, I got my answer.  Apparently the plan is to make the hottest kids action series ever into a teen drama.  Aside from a brief car chase, and a really odd training montage, there is literally no action in the first hour and a half of the movie.  I mean, the premise of the characters being in karate class or something together is out, so no one knows how to fight; the challenge that drives the middle of the film is that they don't know how to morph, so they can't really put them in real danger through most of the film, because they can't handle it; and to top it all off, every kid apparently needs an emotional back story, so instead of action we get to know that all of these kids have some struggles that they deal with.  Their teenagers!  Like, are there any teenagers in the world that aren't dealing with some emotional turmoil more often than not?!  So why do we have to explore all of their specific issues.  Oh yeah, because that apparently the only way they can ever get to morph, so it's also the only way we'll ever get to real action.
Okay, rant over.  There actually were some great things about the movie, but I just can't feel that the relatively good production design outweighs the slow pace, the forced use of outdated catch phases, and the fact that Zordon spends most of the movie planning to betray everyone.  Hopefully they fix all those issues in Power Rangers 2, which we all know is coming thanks to the Marvel-esk ending scene/teaser.  The lack of exposition in the future may make for better sequels, but this franchise may be doomed from the moment they picked it up.  Like I said in the beginning, the cards were stacked against them.
So, if you're a big fan of the classic TV show, rent it cheap or find a friend that has a copy and watch it once, but if you don't NEED to see it, I wouldn't lose any sleep over it.