Movie Nation

A vivid recreation of the early history of professional golf is the principle pleasure of “Tommy’s Honour,” a stately, slow and distressingly dull biography of 19th century Scottish golf hero Tom Morris.

The film was directed by actor-turned-director Jason Connery, son of Sean, a man known for his turn at James Bond and his infatuation with the links. So the son knows a little something about the lay of the land — legendary Scots golf courses.

That’s where Tom Morris learned his game. But we’ll call him Tommy (Jack Lowden), because Tom Morris the elder (the great character actor Peter Mullan) was something of a legend before his son came along to dominate the early years of professional play and “The Open Championship.”

Tom the Elder was a groundskeeper, the man who laid out courses, designed and built clubs and caddied — for the gentlemen of the various clubs that employed him. He was master of the game, and taught his boy everything he knew.

They played as a pair, taking on all comers for the benefit of the wagering gentlemen, who would then pay them a chunk of their winnings.

Tommy the lad sees the injustice of this, of playing to benefit “gentlemen who despise me.” “They think they’re better than me,” and when he insists on payment up front, and a whopping share of the winnings, he has his proof.

“Your station in life was set before you were born,” lectures the captain of the club (Sam Neill). “A gentleman you will NEVER be!” The kid can’t even come into the hallowed halls of the clubs where he battles the best of Great Britain in the 1870s. And he’s not having it.

The golf matches, with their primitive clubs, under-groomed greens and scruffy “links course” settings, are fascinating, but mere interruptions for Tommy’s feud with the gents, with his “know your place, son” dad, and with the older woman with a checkered past (Olivia Lovibond) who wins his heart.

The lad’s parents disapprove, until she proves herself. Tommy struggles, battles the gallery with his fists, lets his success go to his head but never loses his sense of “honour,” as the title is both telling and a pun (“honour” is what the golfer who won the last hole earns, the privilege of swinging first).

And the next thing you know, he’s driving his Escalade into a fire hydrant and it all comes to tears. Sorry, I’m mixing up my tales of great golfers laid low.

The performances, save for Neill’s vulpine turn, are perfunctory. The framework — a reporter coming to interview “The Grand Old Man of Golf” — is trite.

Connery doesn’t give the matches any of the “Greatest Game Ever Played” razzamatazz. The script is most interested in the personal story, rising from the working class to show the rich how to play the rich man’s game, personal tests and personal tragedy.

It’s all ever-so-conventional and conservative, utterly predictable even if you haven’t looked up who Tom Morris the Younger was. And with that being the case, there’s no excuse for Connery’s dawdling style of storytelling.

Sometimes, in movies as in golf, you study the shot and fret over the lay. And sometimes, you should just play through.

MPAA Rating: PG for thematic elements, some suggestive material, language and smoking

Cast: Jack Lowden, Peter Mullan, Olivia Lovibond, Sam Neill

Credits:Directed by Jason Connery, script by Pamela Marin, based on the Kevin Cook biography. A Roadside Attractions release.

Running time:

The great Werner Herzog rarely takes on the effort of getting a fictional feature film made these days. The director of “Aguirre, the Wrath of God,” “Fitzcarraldo” and “Rescue Dawn” has found his meditative documentaries to be a better use of his time. “Grizzly Man,” “Cave of Forgotten Dreams,” “Encounters at the End of the World” and the recent “Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World” are more essays — on art, humanity, life at the extremes and modernity — than simple documentaries.

So when he does take on a feature and it fails, the disappointment is multiplied.

“Salt and Fire” is an odd environmental thriller, a perhaps-promising project that attracted Michael Shannon and Gael Garcia Bernal to Bolivia to see what this mad genius would make of it.

Not much, as it turns out.

A mismatched group of UN-sanctioned scientists — Veronica Ferres, Bernal and Volker Michalowski — arrive in an unnamed country, only to be greeted by armed paramilitaries who blindfold them and bundle them off to a remote hacienda. Nobody speaks Spanish, or even speaks with an accent. The guards are helmeted, with sunshield goggles, so they can’t tell who they are or what they want. 

“I take no pride in this,” their leader apologizes. He’s faintly contemptuous of their fact-finding “mission.”

“Do not try to come to the rescue of a tired world!”

It turns out, he is some sort of industrialist. And the scientists are there to learn about an ecological disaster of immense proportions — a vast salt flat, the “Diablo Blanco,” that was accidentally man-made and is swallowing up a huge swath of the country. That is, unless the volcano sitting beside it erupts and ends life on Earth first.

The head scientist, Laura (Ferres) and the “Consortium” industrialist Riley (Shannon) talk and debate and talk and talk some more. They ponder the imponderable in a sort of David Mamet learns German and has it translated by Werner Herzog dialogue — metallic, poetic, repetitive.

“There is no reality, only selective views of reality.” “The noblest place for a man to die is the place he winds up deadest.”

Riley has a sidekick, a fixer, “the brains” behind the operation. He’s played by real-life Arizona State scientist Lawrence Krauss, plainly no actor and a man not helped by the affectation of a wheelchair.

“I only use the wheelchair when I’m tired of life.”

If you’re going to look ridiculous, there’s no sense half-assing it. And I’m not just talking about Krauss. Herzog, who pointlessly strands his lady scientist in the middle of the salt with two blind native boys, shows flashes of the madness that so fascinated him in his earliest work — in front of and behind the camera.

Whatever he was getting at with “Salt and Fire” — perception twisting environmental parable is my best guess — the picture never coalesces into anything straightforward enough to get a handle on.

Herzog, whose “Into the Inferno” documentary (now on Netflix) is all about volcanoes, may be saying something about nature’s capricious capacity for disaster dwarfing that of man, when it comes to climate change. If so, he’d have been better served sparing Shannon, Bernal and Ferres the effort and Professor Krauss the embarrassment and just made “Salt and Fire” a documentary.

MPAA Rating: unrated

Cast: Veronica Ferres, Michael Shannon, Gael Garcia Bernal, Lawrence Kraus

Credits: Written and directed by Werner Herzog, based on a Tom Bissell short story. An XLRator Media release.

Running time: 1:37

A remote snowy, Northeastern Catholic boarding school, schoolgirls forgotten by their parents over spring break and a sinister presence are the promising ingredients of “The Blackcoat’s Daughter,” a horror thriller concocted by one of the sons of Anthony “Psycho” Perkins and scored by another.

It’s a triumph of tone over content, chills over frights, an under-lit and cryptic tease that never quite measures up to the gloom of its production and the heft of its cast.

Kiernan Shipka of “Mad Men” and Lucy Boynton are Kat (Katherine, to her teachers) and Rose, an underclasswoman and senior stuck at Branford, in the middle of nowhere, New Hampshire (Ontario, actually).

When Mom and Dad don’t show for her turn in the talent show, Kat is “concerned.”

Rose, with plans to get busy with a local boy that night, is more upset at an opportunity lost. Instead, she’s charged with “looking after” Kat, and takes it out on the kid by filling her head with sordid stories of Satanic rites involving nuns, myths about what’s REALLY hidden under that habit.

Writer-director Osgood Perkins gives each of the girls her own chapter heading — “Kat” and “Rose.” And when he switches the setting, there’s a chapter about “Joan.” She’s played by Emma Roberts.

Joan is making her way from Branford to Portsmouth when a man sees her at a frigid bus stop and takes pity on her.

“I just want to help.”

As the man is played by veteran movie heavy James Remar, we fear the worst. But he’s traveling with his testy wife (Lauren Holly). And there’s this story about the daughter Joan reminds him of, a story the wife is quick to undercut.

There’s a phone call home to the parents, a call answered with a scratchy signal and unearthly voice. Knives are introduced as foreshadowing, and the creepy solitude of all the settings is emphasized, along with the gathering darkness.

First-time writer-‘director Osgood Perkins, who never quite made it as an actor, gave us a superior indie thriller (“Cold Comes the Night”) in his first time out as a screenwriter (co-writer). Here, he’s determined to hide his striking starlets’ faces in shadows, hint at Catholic Problems (demonic possession) and let his brother Elvis Perkins fill the soundtrack with properly chilling minor chords until those moments he flings unmotivated violence at us.

“The Blackcoat’s Daughter” — an illusion to a priest’s cassock? — never amounts to much more than its tone, the dread Perkins summons up with morose faces, shadows and music. It’s unconventional for a genre picture. But then, those conventions — motivation, anticipation, empathy and shocks — became conventions because they work. This doesn’t. Not really.

MPAA Rating:R for brutal bloody violence and brief strong language

Cast: Emma Roberts, Kiernan Shipka, James Remar, Lucy Boynton and Lauren Holly

Credits: Written and directed by Oz Perkins. An A24 release.

Running time: 1:34

I can’t tell you what tiny tykes will get out of “The Boss Baby,” the latest rude, grownup-joke riddled ‘toon from Dreamworks.

They’ll probably get a charge out of the “poof” fart joke during the baby powdering scene. Maybe the Three Stooges style dope-slaps this not-HR-approved “boss” delivers to his “team,” his parents and others will earn a giggle.

The sibling rivalry story at the heart of it will probably resonate.

But “Give me BACK that cookie. Cookies are for CLOSERS?” Nah. They won’t get the “Glengarry Glen Ross” reference, or snicker at the fact Alec Baldwin is the voice delivering that line.

The whole premise, with Baldwin voicing a baby executive sent undercover to a family to figure out what the pet company employee parents are doing for those sneaky puppy pushers — puppies steal much of the love meant for babies, after all — is going right over the heads of smaller kids.

But anybody who reveled in Baldwin’s corporate Kool-Aid drinking Jack Donaghy of TV’s “30 Rock” cannot HELP but laugh and laugh a lot at this demented riff on a child’s reaction to the demon seed whom his parents have introduced to him as his new baby brother.

Tim, voiced by Tobey Maguire as an adult looking back on this nightmare from his past, voiced by Miles Christopher Bakshi in his elementary years, is a boy with a vivid, dark imagination. He fantasizes assorted hair-raising adventures as a young man of derring do. Which is why he’s the only one who’s suspicious when his new brother is “delivered in a taxi.” Wearing a (onesie) business suit.

The kid squawks, gurgles, coos and giggles for their parents (Lisa Kudrow and Jimmy Kimmel).  He sucks up all their attention.

“Are you taking over our house? YES you are! Yesss you are!”

But when they’re not looking he’s calling secret meetings with other neighborhood babies, taking calls (on his toy phone) and plotting and scheming. Yes he IS taking over their house.

“I think the kid’s onto me.”

He is. But maybe Tim can be reasoned with so nobody gets hurt.

“We can talk about this over a juice box!”

The brotherly battle royale is on, with the punk with a pacifier trying to organize some counter-espionage against the Puppy Pandering Company and Tim trying to expose the baby for what he really is — a Wall Street goon in diapers.

The film, from “Madagascar” sight-gag guru Tom McGrath and based on a Marla Frazee novel, is peppered with clever touches. Tim’s alarm clock, “Wizzie,” is Gandalf from “The Lord of the Rings.” Wakey wakey, my little Halflings! But every so often, in Tim’s fevered imagination, he breaks format to give real advice.

“FLY, you fools!”

Pacifiers are a quasi-hallucinogenic way of seeing the reality of how babies are made.

“If people knew where babies came from, they’d never HAVE one! Same with hot dogs, by the way.”

Being grounded, in Tim’s mind, puts him in a cell on Alcatraz — in solitary.

But best of all is Baldwin, bringing that brutal purr to every non sequitur (“POWER NAP!”), every put-down (calling Tim by his sissy middle name), every balderdash business aphorism — “Aim for failure, and you’ll always SUCCEED!”

If you can’t see the connection between this fast-talking, heartless brat and Baldwin’s other famous role of the moment, you’re blind.

“We can share!”

“You obviously didn’t go to BUSINESS school”

There are plenty of poor reviews (the fools) piling up on “The Baby Boss.” “Madagascar” wasn’t the subject of many raves, either. Not everybody is going to get it.

But I connected with its out-there take on the first days of sibling rivalry, the acknowledgement that humanity is utterly distracted by cute puppy videos on the Internet and with Baldwin, a silky-smooth comic bully whose onscreen bark is always a lot worse than his bite.

MPAA Rating: PG for some mild rude humor

Cast: The voices of Alec Baldwin, Tobey Maguire, Lisa Kudrow, Steve Buscemi

Credits:Directed by Tom McGrath, script by Michael McCullers, based on the Marla Frazee novel. A Dreamworks/20th Century Fox release.

Running time: 1:37

Huge fan of both the McDonagh brothers, Martin and John Michael. Martin’s the one who brought “In Bruges” and “Seven Psychopaths” to the screen. And his latest all-star cuss-and-kick-in-the-door fest is “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.” Frances McDormand is the enraged mother of a murder victim, Woody Harrelson and Sam Rockwell are lazy, inept sheriff’s department that can’t find her killer.

Mom’s solution? Billboard shaming. And busting the head of everybody who tries to disabuse her of the notion that publicizing her daughter’s fate and the incompetent, disinterested police who won’t solve the case.

Peter Dinklage and John Hawkes and Lucas Hedges are also in the cast. This may be the most dazzling R-rated trailer you will see all year. And Oscar winner McDormand? She’s lost “Fargo” Margie’s good Minnesota manners, that’s for sure.

Yeah, it is shaping up as another epic weekend for Disney’s “Beauty and the Beast” remake. $81 million more ensuring that Emma Watson is now in the “Whatever she wants, pay it, get her” category of leading ladies. $300 million? $400 million, before it’s all-in?

But kids and those who were kids when “Mighty Morphin Power Rangers” were on TV have turned “Power Rangers” into a film franchise, thanks to a $42 million opening weekend. That’s based on late Thursday and all-day Friday estimates, according to Deadline.com. 

“Life,” a sci-fi horror film and pretty much straight “Alien” ripoff, got slightly better reviews and has actual movie stars in it. And is seriously underwhelming the box office. Under $13 million? Really?

Then there was the R-rated comic riff on “CHIPS,” an earlier TV series with no box office stars in it and poor reviews to boot. Warners spent little on it, but they aren’t going to break even on Dax Shepard’s directing/acting bomb. $7 million won’t cover the car/bike chase budget on that one.

“Logan” will have cleared $200 million by Sunday midnight, “Get Out” will be at $150 million after this weekend. “Lego Batman Movie” looks to be finishing its run well south of $200 million (winding down and at $170 at the moment).

They surrendered to the Germans in mere hours, but when the Nazis planned to round up all of the country’s Jews, they organized and ferried them all to safety in Sweden.

That’s all that most people know about Denmark’s involvement in World War II.

“Land of Mine” offers a different view. It’s a military melodrama set in the days just after the war, when Danes forced the Germans trapped in their country to clear all the land mines from the beaches Hitler wanted to become “Fortress Europe.”

And since the last troops to occupy this generally passive country were the boys, Hitler Youth turned into troopers in the last year  of the war, the Danes were sending children out to defuse mines, risking death or maiming in the process.

“If you’re old enough to go to war, you’re old enough to clean up your own mess,” is what the burly Sgt. Rasmussen (Roland Møller) is told by his superiors.

But as he and we can see, when you’re sending “little boys,” barely-teen-aged kids to do this, there’s something else to the psychology of it. Rasmussen, a paratrooper who served with the army in exile out of Britain, may “remember what they did to us.” But if the young Germans are being made to atone for their sins, Danish shame over their initial lack of resistance is one of the sins they’re digging up.

Martin Zandvliet’s film has an overly familiar story arc in which every possible outcome of a scene is telegraphed well in advance.

Rasmussen is harsh, cold and uncaring — working his charges half-to-death as they poke at the ground, remove and count mines one at a time, going for days without food on their remote Danish beach. We can see he will soften. Eventually.

Every mine-sweeping outing is fraught with peril, as kids from that shortest-attention-span age must perform a rote task with the utmost care, or kill themselves in the process.

Writer-director Zandvliet (“A Funny Man”) builds a sharp barracks pecking order among the boy soldiers, showing German discipline (they’re reluctant to escape their “duty”) and German ingenuity (methodical inventions for for efficient mine-clearing).

There are predicable moments of peril for a local child and a local dog, with the boys showing their humanity and Rasmussen recognizing it (or losing his own).

Møller and assorted kids (Louis Hofmann,  Oskar Bökelmann) give sympathetic/empathetic performances.

But every story beat seems preordained, a variation of something we’ve seen in a dozen earlier WWII POW movies, right down to the football (soccer) game. That doesn’t mean that every death isn’t a shock, every sudden explosion a jolt.

The simplistic predictability of it is all that mutes the impact of this story of war guilt and survivor’s guilt, at least to viewers outside of Denmark. I can imagine it as having more a cathartic effect there.

And the humanity of the performances and pathos of the tale shine through the tropes and cliches to make this smart movie with the dumb-pun for a title a worthy enterprise and well worth your time.

MPAA Rating:R for violence, some grisly images, and language

Cast:Roland Møller, Louis Hofmann, Josef Basman, Oskar Bökelmann

Credits:Written and directed by Martin Zandvliet. A Sony Pictures Classics release.

Running time: 1:40

What more can be done with the “Ten Little Indians” formula — packing people into a “trapped” scenario, and picking them off, one-by-one?

“The Belko Experiment” proves that the answer is “nothing,” if you don’t count “We can always make it more gory/graphic.” It’s a depraved disappointment, considering those involved.

The plot, invented by Poe and perfected by Agatha Christie, hurls disparate characters into a desperate situation, and lets them show their true colors as each is slaughtered in turn.

Belko Industries is a multi-national recruiting non-profit (?) set up in a gigantic, remote high-rise in suburban Bogota, Colombia. One day Michael (John Gallagher, Jr.), the boss (Tony Goldwyn) and everybody else drives onto the property to find armed uniformed soldiers checking everybody in.

Not everybody. Just the foreigners. The locals are sent home.

Eighty folks — from creepy managers (John C. McGinley) to grunt maintenance engineers (Michael Rooker) and new employees (Melonie Diaz) — are in the building when the PA system alarms everyone.

They are ordered to “murder any two of your fellow employees,” or else. And before the shock is shaken off, metal shutters slam down over every exit, the clock “expires” and several of their number die — their heads exploding.

Must be that “tracker” the company implanted in their necks, reasons Michael. He freaks out, which his office romance (Adria Arjona) finds unmanly and his boss uncalled for.

“I don’t believe there’s any cause for panic,” he says. Not that anyone believes him.

They’re given a couple of hours to pile up 30 bodies, and that’s time enough for the factions to form. Murderous management is out for itself, office drones try not to become their prey, the competent engineer wanders off in search of solutions and the stoners, led by Marty (Sean Gunn) head up to the roof to light a “j” and cope.

James Gunn, Sean’s brother, gave us “Guardians of the Galaxy,” and his script has Michael as the voice of humanity and reason. Even if they do what the  PA “voice” orders, they’re doomed (no witnesses will be allowed to escape). Why kill each other?

Not that anybody else listens.

Goldwyn is reliably venal and self-serving (think back to his “Ghost” villainy),  McGinley properly unhinged.

The trouble is, nobody else engenders sympathy or registers. They’re just victims waiting to happen. And once you’ve seen one head explode, you’ve seen enough. Ugh.

Too little is made of the workplace satire that was this story’s selling point. Anybody who works for a living in America knows “corporate” would just as soon kill them, if it helps the bottom line. There are no heroic “undercover” bosses — just automatons looking to get theirs, at your expense if need-be.

“Wolf Creek” director Greg McLean efficiently runs through the deaths, but where’s the terror, puzzle-solving logic or anything else to hold our interest? It’s just unpleasant, nothing more.

And there’s this pet peeve I have about any movie with people “trapped” and doomed,  unable to call for help. From “Don’t Breathe” to “Belko,” they never figure out the obvious.

Set a fire.

MPAA Rating: R for strong bloody violence throughout, language including sexual references, and some drug use

Cast: John Gallagher, Jr., Tony Goldwyn, Adria Arjona, John C. McGinley, Melonie Diaz, Michael Rooker

Credits:Directed by Greg McLean, script by James Gunn. A Blumhouse/Orion release.

Running time: 1:28

The only way to approach that ’70s TV series “ChiPs” as a movie was as a goof, so at least Dax Shepard’s riff on it had the right idea.

This is “The Brady Bunch” on bikes, with blood and guts and gunplay and sex addiction and the language of mental health counseling kneaded into the “relationships” shown on screen. It’s R-rated, giving a “Hangover” hook to potential moviegoers who remember the mild-mannered, toothy TV series, endlessly re-run on cable.

Michael Peña is game for taking on Erik Estrada’s iconic role, as “Ponch” Poncherello.

And Shepard, a real gearhead (See his “Hit and Run” for proof), is at home on a motorcycle and knows how to shoot and edit a chase on wheels.

But “CHIPS” has a sourness about it from its graphic violence, and a clunky way with its gags. A telling example? The motorcycle cops Ponch and Jon (Shepard) chase down a speeding scofflaw in a Ferrari.

He’s played by Hollywood’s Green Car poster boy Ed Begley, Jr. Nothing is made of that. They let him play “himself” in a gas-guzzling/polluting and pricey sports car, there’s a joke. Without that? Nada.

Peña is a Miami FBI agent re-assigned to LA, undercover to help nail rogue cops who are running a bike-riding armored car theft ring. This agent is a trigger happy sex addict, something his rageaholic boss (Isiah Whitlock, Jr.) is all too happy to point out.

Shepard is “the oldest rookie” in California Highway Patrol (CHP, “CHiPs”) history, an amiable goofball who has aged out of the motocross/X-Games stardom that broke and re-broke his body and ended his marriage (to Shepard’s real-life wife, Kristen Bell).

Jon Baker can’t shoot straight, shares entirely too much personal information with everybody he meets (“You’re three-beers too intimate!”), but he can ride a bike “like a mother—–r.” Which is the only thing he has on his new “partner,” Francis Llewelyn Poncherello.

The dirty cops are killing each other over these heists as Ponch and Baker haphazardly investigate and reluctantly bond their way to glory.

Shepard, who wrote and directed this, struggles to find laughs in the language of self-help, with Baker poking Ponch for his sexual problems and “deflecting” way of dealing with them. He and Peña are likable enough, on their own, but they don’t click as a couple.

The ways Shepard tries to write-around Ponch’s delusional “sex symbol” shtick don’t click. Wasting Maya Rudolph as Baker’s police academy examiner doesn’t pay dividends.

The one nod to the ’70s origins of the project is the soundtrack, with Toto, Supertramp, Nazareth and The O’Jays played for (barely) comic effect.

The violence is “Oh no they didn’t” over-the-top, funny only up to a point.

And the heavy (Vincent D’Onofrio) seems to be parked in a different movie.

But the bike chases are crisp and cleverly-cut together — cameras on the handlebars or attached to the chassis, Shepard obviously on the bike in all but the most difficult stunts.

It’s coherent enough to suggest competence, but Shepard plainly would have been better served sending the script out for doctoring, or contenting himself with acting and maybe second-unit (action sequence) directing.

MPAA Rating:R for crude sexual content, graphic nudity, pervasive language, some violence and drug use.

Cast: Michael Peña, Dax Shepard, Vincent D’Onofrio, Kristen Bell, Isiah Whitlock Jr., Jane Kazmarek, Maya Rudolph

Credits:Written and directed by Dax Shepard. A Warner Brothers release.

Running time: 1:40

Nostalgia can be a hard sell beyond the demographic parameters of its generation. So, full disclosure here, the “Mighty Morphin Power Rangers” were never my thing, any more than “Transformers” or even “G.I.Joe” were.

Whatever their virtues or appeal, they’re all lumped into an entertainment-that-sells-toys corner of ’80s-90s kids TV shlock that I made a point to channel surf right by.

But I can appreciate, at least, the brio that cast and crew brought to “Power Rangers,” the movie reboot of the silly-suited Japanese TV import about teens turned superheroes to save the Earth from alien villainy.

It’s smartly cast, and shot and edited with real verve, with moments of banter and diversity and just enough teen angst (bullies don’t stand a chance in this world) to render it relevant and of-our-moment.

“Do you feel weird?”

“Weirder than usual?”

It’s still two hours and four minutes I will never, ever get back — utter piffle, from its Cenozoic Era opening to the closing credits of what Lionsgate hopes will become a franchise.

The set-up? Teen misfits gather and stumble into their calling. They include the adrenaline junky high school quarterback (Aussie Dacre Montgomery) whose latest prank, staged with gusto (and a car chase) got him injured, house arrest and an ankle bracelet. There’s leggy Kimberly (Naomi Scott), ostracized by her  clique and in Saturday “Breakfast Club” detention because of cell phone harassment. Nerdy “I’m on the spectrum” Billy (RJ Cyler of “Me and Earl and the Dying Girl”) is the one who drags everybody to this mine in Angel Falls where his dad used to work. And that’s where they pick up Asian (Ludi Lin) and Latina (Becky G.) teens who fill out their quintet.

Magic coins open up a buried spaceship, where obnoxiously adorable robot Alpha (Bill Hader selling his voice) and ancient alien do-gooder Zordan (Bryan Cranston? Seriously?) give the kids their marching orders.

“It’s MORPHIN time!”

And those are to foil Rita Repulsive (Elizabeth Banks. Of course. ), who takes a licking and keeps on quipping. Badly.

Director Dean Israelite of “Project Almanac” uses extreme close-ups in chases and brawls, all to decent effect. The digital effects are shiny and just cheesy enough to summon memories of the TV show. The Ranger uniforms? Updated.

But that story does nothing but remind you of how often we’ve seen this “Teens Get Superpowers” drivel. It was old news when “Chronicle” took it on and made the point that Generation Distracted maybe wasn’t the best choice for omnipotence.

The players, attractive as they are, register more as “types” filling out an EEO chart than distinct people, save for the first three introduced. The dialogue devolves into variations of “I got this.” Banks, the poor thing, should take out a contract on whoever did her makeup, lit and photographed her. “Repulsive” is an understatement, and that’s the skin tone where the makeup and mask aren’t covering her.

And when it’s over, its messages about reckless behavior, “misfits” and mortality delivered, if you don’t feel all warm and fuzzy about it, you must not have grown up with the dippy TV show theme-song memorized.

MPAA Rating:PG-13 for sequences of sci-fi violence, action and destruction, language, and for some crude humor

Cast: Dacre Montgomery, Naomi Scott, RJ Cyler, Ludi Lin, Becky G., Elizabeth Banks, Bryan Cranston and the voice of Bill Hader

Credits:Directed by Dean Israelite, script by John Gatins, based on the Shaim Saban TV series. A Lionsgate release.

Running time: 2:04