RJ Cyler – Memphis Flyer

From Animal House to Project X, the party movie has a long and distinguished heritage. There are a set of common ingredients for these comedies: There’s a high school or college-age main character, like Molly Ringwald’s Sam in Sixteen Candles, who is smart and kind but feels like an outcast. There’s the wild friend, like Ashton Kutcher’s Jesse in Dude, Where’s My Car?, who goads the strait-laced hero into a night of debauchery, usually on the last night of the school year. There’s a clique of antagonistic popular kids at the top of the school’s social pyramid who lord their power over our socially awkward heroes. There’s the secret, illicit party, ripe with the promise of drugs and sex, that our central friends are trying to find. Then there’s the rogues gallery of, in the immortal words of the school secretary in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, “the sportos, the motorheads, geeks, sluts, bloods, wasteoids, dweebies, and dickheads,” who provide fodder for some over-the-top comedy.

The last great party movie was 2019’s Booksmart, which was one of the best comedies of the last decade. With brilliant direction by Olivia Wilde and a pair of inspired performances from Beanie Feldstein and Kaitlyn Dever as a pair of overachieving best friends who throw caution to the wind once they’ve been accepted to their first-choice colleges, they upended the bro-heavy Superbad formula by letting women be just as irresponsible as the guys — right down to Billie Lourd as the film’s druggie Spicoli figure. Now, director Carey Williams and writer K.D. Dávila bring the party picture to the Black college scene with Emergency.

Sabrina Carpenter as Maddie in *Emergency*.

Kunle (Donald Elise Watkins) and Sean (RJ Cyler) are roomies and best friends at the fictional Buchanan College. Their personalities are opposite. Kunle is a straight-A student with aspirations of pursuing a Ph.D. at Princeton. Sean, on the other hand, has skated through his four years of college untroubled by things like ambition and responsibility. They are united, along with their third housemate Carlos (Sebastian Chacon), by their love of good weed. As graduation approaches, Sean convinces Kunle to make an attempt at the college’s grand slam — attending seven fraternity and sorority parties in one manic night. He’s pulled strings, called in favors, and traded bud for invites to all the soirees, but Kunle is predictably reluctant. Achieving a perfect GPA means successfully completing one last science lab experiment with some recalcitrant fungi, and Kunle wants to check to make sure his subjects are progressing as planned. That throws off Sean’s carefully considered schedule of revelry — and besides, who goes to the science lab on Friday night?

When they drop by their apartment to pick up the passes, they find a surprise lying in a pool of vomit on their floor — a white girl (Maddie Nichols) overdosing on an unknown drug. Neither Sean nor Kunle know her, and Carlos, having already settled into his bedroom for a quiet night of bong rips and gaming, didn’t hear her come in.

Kunle starts to call 911, but Sean stops him. What will the paramedics, the cops, and the Princeton admissions committee think when they see two Black guys and a Hispanic guy standing over an ODed white girl? They decide it’s better to drop her off at the emergency room and make a quick exit before people start asking questions they can’t answer. But once they get her in the car, they realize that, if they get pulled over by police, they run the risk of getting shot.

Emergency sometimes plays their fear for laughs, and uses the ever-present threat of a bad encounter with a racist cop as another complication to throw into the plot. But the story, which was based on Williams’ and Dávila’s award-winning short film, makes subtle comment on other party/caper movies. If the protagonists of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off had been Black, they would have never gotten away with claiming to be the Sausage King of Chicago. Thanks to finely layered performances by Watkins and Cyler, the film puts you in the shoes of the college kids who just want to party, but for whom the potential cost of a little transgressive fun is much higher than the white college kids who let a high school girl get too wasted. Indeed, when the girl’s irresponsible sister Maddy (Sabrina Carpenter) finds out she’s in a car with three people of color, she assumes it’s a kidnapping. Emergency is a little heavier than your normal party movie, but it’s still a bong-ripping good time.

The endless parade of toy commercial cartoon nostalgia reboots has reached the 1990s. That’s a kind of progress, right?

Anyway, if nothing else good comes out of the Power Rangers movie, at least I learned a new word. (Yes, dear reader, I do research. Shocking, I know.) The word is tokusatsu, a Japanese term that literally means “special filming.” It refers to a genre of live-action, effects-heavy fantasy and sci-fi films and TV shows, including the Toho Studios kaiju films from the 1950s and ’60s like Mothra, Ghidorah, and Destroy All Monsters. TV tokusatsu includes Ultraman and the incredibly long-running Super Sentai series, which has been serving up color-coded super-team action since 1975. The Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, which became an American kids TV sensation in 1993, was originally an adaptation of season 16 of Super Sentai, which reused all of the original Japanese special-effects sequences with new English-language teen-drama scenes filling in the gaps. (This is the same scam that turned Gojira, a dark, angsty film that recalled the horrors of Hiroshima and the firebombing of Tokyo, into Godzilla, a silly monster movie where Raymond Burr stands around passively watching things blow up.)

One of the defining features of tokusatsu is people in rubber suits playing monsters. For a movie like Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster, the man in the suit would go tromping through miniature cityscapes to create the flimsy illusion of a giant monster on the rampage. By the time the 16th season of Super Sentai rolled around, they weren’t bothering with the little buildings any more. The Mighty Morphin Power Rangers usually fought the monster of the week in a quarry, or perhaps a state park. Tokusatsu is all about doing it on the cheap.

It had to happen eventually — the color-coded, high school-aged heroes are back.

If it sounds like I’m making fun of this stuff, well, I am. But it’s respectful mockery. There’s certain integrity in cheap, gonzo monster movies. The appeal of the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers was all about what outrageous villain our teen heroes would fight each week. From Scorpina, the human-scorpion hybrid, to Lokar, the floating blue demonic head, the poor saps with no budget tasked with creating increasingly weird rubber suits carried the show for a decade.

Sadly, in this, the third Power Rangers movie, the crass exploitation is in full effect, but the anything-goes spirit is nowhere to be found. Our color-coded heroes are played by moderately priced TV actors, or, in the case of the Yellow Ranger by Becky G., a 20-year-old YouTube star. At least she’s vaguely age appropriate. The Black Ranger, Ludi Lin, is a 29-year-old playing a high school kid. Naomi Scott, the Pink Ranger, is the Jean Grey to Dacre Montgomery, the Red Ranger’s Cyclops, if I may mix my super-team metaphors. The only actor to leave any sort of impression is Me and Earl and the Dying Girl’s RJ Cyler as the Blue Ranger, the autistic brainiac whose nighttime excursions to the small town of Angel Grove’s gold mine uncover the alien power coins buried during the Cenozoic era, transforming our Breakfast Club of misfits into all the colors of the wuxia rainbow. Their chief antagonist is fallen Power Ranger Rita Repulsa, played all the way to the katana hilt by Elizabeth Banks. Subtlety was never a Power Ranger virtue, and Banks seems to be the only person on screen who understands how camp works.

After her 65 million-year-old corpse is dredged up from the sea bottom by the Red Ranger’s dad (Angel Grove apparently being that rare town that has both an open-pit gold mine and a deep sea fishing fleet), Rita Repulsa’s plan is to collect enough gold to build her giant monster Goldar and dig up the long dormant Zeo Crystal, a mystical artifact she will use to destroy all life on Earth, or something. In the most brazen act of product placement in recent memory, the crystal is located beneath a Krispy Kreme.

Instead of leaning into the tokusatsu and challenging our heroes with a wide array of modestly budgeted yet totally outrageous monsters, Power Rangers opts for the Marvel Third Act (TM) move of throwing a bunch of identical, grayish cannon-fodder aliens at them. Even Goldar, the boss fight, is a letdown, looking like he was stolen from the virtual set of Gods of Egypt. I know this is exploitation, and that means cheap knockoffs of whatever is popular in the big budget world right now, but I think that fat, Krispy Kreme money would have been better spent putting the stunt men in better costumes. This is not the time for restraint. This is Power Rangers.