Legend of the White Dragon will be released in theaters on August 28.

Let’s get one thing straight up front: Legend of the White Dragon is not a Power Rangers movie.

Yes, for those of my generation that grew up watching Power Rangers, it does include plenty of familiar faces, putting the late Jason David Frank (Mighty Morphin Power Rangers) as well as Jason Faunt (Time Force) and Ciara Hanna (Megaforce) front and center in what is a clear nostalgia play to draw in fans of the original shows. There are even moments in the movie where, if you really squint hard enough, it can almost look and feel like a more adult version of a Power Rangers show… not in the way that the largely forgotten 2017 movie did, but in how the visual effects are often quite shaky and there’s a big ol’ heaping of earnest cheesiness poured over it. It all makes this Kickstarter-funded project play more like a YouTube fan film than a standalone work, but there can be a charm to such an endeavor, and there is something admirable in the abstract about a group of people coming together to make a movie like this.

Unfortunately, while there remains plenty of actual charm in the shows this movie’s cast became known for, that’s utterly lacking in the execution here as the entire thing comes apart with shocking speed. Even as it was able to create its own thing, Legend of the White Dragon feels like a sequel weighed down by a whole series of movies that nobody in the audience has actually seen.

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