|
|
|
Movie Review : Chronicle
Thursday, February 02, 2012 2:59:09 PM (IST)
|
Anaam, Bollywood Trade Editorial
It is an interesting idea bogged down by a story that gets predictable as it unfolds and finally ends in a farcical climax of a designer studio film. The force fitted low-cost ‘point of view’ filming strategy to give the film a documentary look and feel a la THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT adds to its woes and it turns out to be an implausible ‘B’ Grade supernatural ‘found-footage’ home video thriller. And the typical American cliché that a young fellow who gets hell at home, creates hell outside, deserves derisive boos and yawns of the informed audiences.
Andrew Detmer (Dane DeHaan) exists in a gloomy world of a bed-ridden sick mother, an unemployed father who hates the little pleasures his son gets like playing around with a video camera, chronicling every moment of his life. In his school everyone, for reasons like his insistence on recording everything on his camera, bullies him. He has a friend Matt (Alex Russell), a bore and a misfit who talks like a dictionary yet is outgoing by nature and is willing to fall in love with the next girl who shows the willingness to carry on a conversation with him. Matt is friendly with Steve Montgomery (Michael B. Jordan), a black guy, a genial student leader of the school.
The threesome stray out of a party of teens and discover a kind of tunnel-cum-cave and venture inside it and come across a crystalline formation and their lives don’t remain the same. They become super-powerful. They can move objects and even fly high above in the sky using their newly acquired power. Till this point the film remains interesting, as its denouement is unfathomable and you expectations run riot. However, the helmer’s anxiety to justify his camera positions keeps rankling your mind all through.
The sensible two, Matt and Steve, set certain rules to keep their supernatural power under wraps and control. Andrew does not fully agree with them. In the mean time Matt has become friendly with a girl Casey (Ashley Hinshaw), a video-blogger, who never goes out without a camera just like Andrew. This is the character that has been introduced in the plot to justify another camera position, an obvious juvenile ploy.
The story starts moving predictably now. Steve dies in an accident caused by a quarrelling Andrew’s irresponsible outburst of his superpowers. As the conditions at Andrew’s home deteriorate and get despairing, he goes berserk and bad. He also has a philosophy now. The strong must rule over the weak, as a lion rules the jungle. He develops his lion’s roar too. What follows is a fight on ground and into the air between the rogue Andrew and the gentle Matt with a preordained predictable winner.
The film’s helmer Josh Trank seems to have struggled more to justify and explain his camera positions than adding substance to his story. His stratagem is too palpable to impress the lay audience as well as the cognoscenti. It was not needed. He uses ‘found footage’ idea like a fetish and not as a cinematic element that could have heightened the drama and build a strong narrative around an interesting low budget ‘superpower’ concept. The film brings nothing new on the table in terms of it technical wizardry, or VFX, but for its idea that could have been developed in much more wholesome and substantive ways. Let us see how does it fare at the box-office and if it’s interesting trailer succeeds in drawing young audiences to the theatre this weekend. The film is releasing worldwide on 3rd February 2012.
Rating - 1.5/5
Tags : Chronicle Movie Review, Chronicle English Movie Review, Chronicle Review, Josh Trank, Dane DeHaan, Michael B. Jordan, Michael Kelly, Alex Russell, John Davis, Adam Schroeder
|
More Movie Reviews
|
|
|
|
|
Sections
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|