Michael's Movie Grade: D
A bland and very cliché superhero movie and probably the weakest Disney + original movie yet.
Stop me if you heard this one before. A group of teenagers discover that they have superpowers and go to a special class to learn how to control them. However their powers may come in use sooner than them or their teacher think as a villain just might be up to know good and these teenager might be the only one to stop them. Yes this story has been done before (including by Disney). The problem is that the previous times this story has been done far outshine this bland retelling. The characters are strictly one note and feel like what someone whose only exposure to teenagers is bad cliché movies might come up with. We have the rebellious punk rocker, the self-absorbed cool kid, the social awkward nerdy kid, the overly nice girl and the materialistic pretty girl (who has a lot of followers online, because this movie is hip and current). These kids who are nothing alike of course form a friendship that is the greatest power of all. Though when exactly this friendship is formed (and they go from making fun of each other to deeply caring about each other) must have happened off screen because it seemed to come out of nowhere for me. The humor is just kind of there and neither made me laugh or groan, but rather just shrug at how that was supposed to be funny. A subplot involving our main protagonist's best friend feeling like she doesn't care about him any more feels like little more than padding to take some extra time. The main story itself seems to be going through the motions making sure it can check off each cliché point about these types of movies.
On the plus side the villain feels like a real threat to our heroes and the action scenes are surprisingly pretty well done.
Overall this is simply a movie to skip.
-Michael J. Ruhland
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