Despite featuring a clutch of Power Rangers graduates, including Jason David Frank, who died in 2022, this crowdfunded effort is beholden to a more recent action tradition. It feels like it's been cobbled together by ticking tropes off the modern superhero bingo card: Dark Knight-esque pariah hero, Gotham-style civic pantomime with the mayor, police and media, Iron Man helmet-cams, a sprig of eastern mysticism in the initiation sequence, western fighters appropriating said eastern mysticism … the list goes on.
After a dustoff with his nemesis Ashtagor that levelled downtown Virtuo City, the superhero White Dragon (Frank) has been held responsible for the catastrophe and forced into exile. With the death count – 1,263 – tattooed in red above his right ear, and the crystal that was the source of his power shattered in two, he is now plain old Erik Reed. It's not only the authorities who are bent on finding him: the pharma mogul Jai Katua (Aaron Schoenke), who lost his pregnant wife, wants payback. If Katua spending his time on solo katana sessions in his billionaire superlab wasn't already a mental health red flag, accepting one of the crystal halves and a revenge mandate from Ashtagor should definitely merit an intervention.
Considering the presumably teeny budget, Legend of the White Dragon manages a fair approximation of the lacquered hi-tech blockbuster look, and calls in a couple of classy cameos: Michael Madsen, giving the lore a gravitas boost, and Mark Dacascos, who can do kung fu monk blindfolded. The many martial arts sequences are simple but emphatic, in the Power Rangers style. But Schoenke, directing with his father, Sean, unbalances his own film by the simple fact that his own character – a kind of disintegrating, evil Bruce Wayne – is far more interesting than the protagonist.
The limp Frank is an energy vacuum, typical of a general acting level that makes Marvel look like Merchant Ivory. Not that the sappy interludes between the fisticuffs, focusing on his sins-of-the-father issues and Katua's ragebait memories of his former family idyll, help. There's too little here that might lead the superhero genre into offbeat indie pastures, like Chronicle did back in 2012; only Andrew Bachelor's supercomputer URI, as if JARVIS had been reprogrammed as Chris Rock, hints at the possibilities, sassily repeating “scanning†as the bland superhero crew waits for intel.
