Mini Review - Turbo: A Power Rangers Movie

Here’s the second of the Power Rangers cinematic outings. But unlike the first one, this is canon to the TV show, essentially a cinematic 3-part opener to the new Power Rangers Turbo series, following on from Power Rangers Zeo. At the end of Zeo Lord Zed and Rita Repulsa had destroyed the Machine Empire and promised a comeback, but we’re not getting that here.

So, this movie holds an abysmal 13% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and is hated by fans and critics alike. So, why is this so revered? Here’s my take on the movie.

So, we open with a Star Wars Title scrawl, which is never a good sign unless it’s actually Star Wars, which doesn’t have a flawless track record either. And we get introduced to the first big problem with movie, some of the worst puppetry I’ve ever seen. Lerigot is some kind of space-wizard that’s allergic to sunlight because of bullsh*t. He knows Alpha, a connection so deep they share about 5 seconds of screen-time in the entire movie. Yeah, but there’s a good 30 seconds of kids singing ‘row your boat’

Lerigot is being pursued by a Space Pirate named Divatox, who seeks to unleash a monster named Maligore and become his wife and then she’ll be rich or something

Forget Ivan Ooze’s plan in the last movie, this one takes the cake, twice. So, the boys are preparing for some big charity fight event to save an orphanage when Rocky injures himself by falling onto a mat. Isn’t the mat there to help them avoid injury. Anyway, Steve Cardenas, who played him had fallen into a contract dispute and this ultimately wrote him out, he wouldn’t return to acting until this year.

This of course leaves a gap in the Ranger’s ranks and we get the second mistake in the movie, Justin, the new Blue Ranger. He’s half the age of the others, has zero experience, no evidence of any of the qualities that make a Power Ranger and did I mention he’s half the age of the others? Yeah, it’s kinda dumb. Speaking of, because of toys and for no real reason in-continuity, the Rangers are granted a new set of powers and Zords, Turbo ones. What happened to the Zeo Powers from the previous season? Here's their answer.

Look at the cute puppy!

But don’t worry, it takes them 1 hour and 12 minutes before there’s a morphed action scene. This is unacceptable! You can’t have a Power Rangers movie without the f*cking Power Rangers and there really should be more than 1 morphed action scene. This movie is only 90 minutes long.

Jason (who only just left at the end of Zeo) and Kimberly wanted to surprise the Rangers by going scuba-diving in the middle of the ocean. (Good job) they get captured by Divatox along with Bulk and Skull who are even more pointless in this movie than they were in the last one. They’re supposed to be sacrifices to the Demon but because Power Rangers has no balls whatsoever they’re not killed, just temporarily turned evil for the actual Rangers to fight. Also, blatent continuity error on the island. In once scene, Jason has a rope tied around his waist (or his dick), in the next, it’s chains around his wrists.

So the demon is released, Divatox realises this may have been a really dumb plan, the Rangers defeat it rather easily with the turbo-megazord and they win the fight competition. The end.

For what it’s worth, the fights, both morphed and unmorphed look good and because they want to match up with the Sentai footage they’ll be using for Power Rangers Turbo, there’s no really painful CGI zords like there was before, or it might just be a lack of budget, everything looks a lot cheaper this time around.

As an advertisement for the rest of Power Rangers Turbo, I’m not exactly enthralled. Divatox did not impress and neither did any of her right hands or foot-soldiers (which end up looking completely different in the show anyway) as a promotion for toys on the other hand it does pretty well, a little too well. I did mention how forced the Turbo powers are in the first place, there’s no mention of their origin and outside some computer sh*t no mention of how the Zords were created, just a over-elongated scene introducing the team to their cars.

In addition the rangers get their weapons out of no-where, these weapons weren’t even mentioned until this point but before we get any action they have to shout out the names of their weapons because BUY THIS SH*T!

Turbo: A Power Rangers Movie continues the trend of Power Rangers Movies being mediocre, it doesn’t commit anything egregious enough to make it outright bad, but the action alone is not enough to make it good.

Rating 45/100