Chronicle
Director: Josh Trank
Cast: Dane DeHaan, Alex Russell, Michael B. Jordan
Rated: PG-13
Running time: 84 minutesAre you ready to sit back and be told a story unlike any you've ever experienced? Well, so am I, but since there's nothing like that playing in the theatre right now, we'll have to settle for a familiar story and hope it's at least told well.
Here we have a movie in which the producers sought to take a modern classic teenage movie gimmick (hand-held camera footage) and combine it with the true classic teenage dream of getting a superpower and causing trouble.
The story begins with high-school-geek-boy wanting to catch his abusive father on tape but ends up taking his movie camera everywhere he goes. He goes down a pit with some other boys who end up finding some mysterious glowing thing that gives them telekinesis (power to mess things up with your mind).
Most of the film is pretty much three young guys goofing around with their new powers, playing pranks and engaging in general tomfoolery (not to give anything away, but the fact that they didn't use their powers to remove ladies' clothes seemed a little suspect). However, as countless superpower movies have taught us, with great power comes great responsibility. And whenever super powers get stronger, eventually someone gets carried away and has to be stopped.
In the end, this certainly isn't the worst teenager-with-superpowers movie you've ever seen. Perhaps most surprising was the effective use of the hand-held camera gimmick that has certainly been abused in this post-Blair Witch universe.
