Cheesy 'Power Rangers' reboot takes itself too seriously

There's a question every piece of intellectual property needs to ask itself before a new version is made: How seriously should we treat the source material?

In the case of “Power Rangers,” that cheesy Saturday morning show that cobbled together shameless merchandising goals, dubbed Japanese action footage and sanitized high school shenanigans, they went mostly serious. And it might not have been the best call for a story that still involves a villain named Rita Repulsa who wanders around town eating gold. But we'll get to her later.

Even with such campy morsels to play with, the vibe director Dean Israelite seems to be going for is “Friday Night Lights” meets “Fantastic Four,” which actually isn't totally awful at the beginning as we meet the five high school students destined to wield their newly found superpowers to save the world.

There's the star football player, Jason (Dacre Montgomery), who's rebelling against his good-boy image; the once-popular Kimberly (Naomi Scott); the “on-the-spectrum” Billy (RJ Cyler); the mysterious new girl Trini (Becky G.); and the adventurous Zack (Ludi Lin). They're angsty teens with secrets and zero perspective, so imagine how weird things get when they all happen to be hanging out one night in a restricted mining area, stumble upon some jewels, get into a would-be fatal car crash, and wake up with the ability to crush iPhones and scale mountains.

It's hard to muck up the excitement of testing out your newfound superpowers, but then the ridiculous plot has to kick in (and all the requisite origin story clichés) and you can see the film struggling to maintain its straight face while Bryan Cranston's pin art face bellows at the Rangers and Elizabeth Banks' Rita Repulsa devours every piece of gold she can find.

Banks is fairly fun in the part - she snivels and sneers with campy glee under pounds of zombie makeup like she's the only one who understands what movie she's in.

But this film overstays its very conditional welcome. Israelite gives the images some grit and visual interest, but the story spends too much time on the maudlin coming-of-age and teambuilding. A little less therapy and a little more action would have gone a long way in the mushy middle section.