[Kamen Rider Lucha]

I thought this movie was pretty great when it was being The Breakfast Club-meets-Chronicle, which fortunately was like 75% of the movie. But once it became a full-fledged Power Rangers movie, it was disappointing.

They only used their martial arts fighting skills for like, 30 seconds before jumping in those horribly designed Zords. The never got proper henshin sequences. They totally skipped what could have been and awesome gattai sequence. They never combined weapons to form a mega canon. They never used an awesome finishing attack -- instead opting for a weird body slam move to kill Goldar. None of these things would have been hard to add to the movie.

I guess I just felt like it became apparent in the last 20 minutes that the movie was not made by a genuine fan, and it was not made by someone who is good at, or cares about, super hero action. I mean, I'm glad we got Go Go Power Rangers and the Zord rollout homage -- the theater went nuts for that -- but it was one ten second shout out. The whole third act should have been stuffed with moments like those -- instead, we got ten seconds. I now understand why some of the reviews say that the movie is embarrassed to be a Power Rangers movie.

Criticisms aside, I was surprised how much I enjoyed the character work and teenage stuff. All that stuff worked so well. As did the movie's humor. If the next movie can build on that stuff, while improving the action a ton and embracing it's PR/Sentai roots, I think we have a winner of a franchise on our hands. Just please, for the love of god, redesign the zords and ranger suits, they're hideous.