Chronicle
High school kids with super abilities.
Review
Why is everyone on the silver screen always out to save the earth? To
assuage our guilt that humans are destroying it? As let’s be honest
here, if the average bunch of high school boys obtained super abilities
their first instinct wouldn’t be to fight crime, but to lark about at
1000ft and play pranks with telekinesis. Itchy was therefore excited to
find out that Chronicle is about just this.
The film begins with misfit Andrew (Dane DeHaan), his cousin Matt (Alex Russell) and popular kid Steve (Michael B. Jordan), exploring a mysterious pothole. What they find there gives them powers that change their lives forever, but can they deal with the resultant responsibility?
Sounds interesting, yes? Unfortunately, Itchy didn’t need powers of divination to tell exactly how the story would pan out and by halfway through we were sat on the edge of our seats egging on, not the characters, but the director and scriptwriter. ‘Come on Josh Trank and Max Landis,’ we cried to the annoyance of our fellow cinema-goers ‘kick that cliché in the balls! You can do it! You can... OK, no, no you can’t…’
Don’t get us wrong, Chronicle is still an enjoyable experience - the visuals are beautiful, there’s some good chuckles, respectable performances all around, and the obscure device of telling the whole film through the medium of found footage is… well, mostly not cringe-worthy; yet the likes of Kick-Ass and Misfits can still K.O. Chronicle with the twitch of a finger.
Ever since the film industry was bitten by the radioactive bug of comic books it’s been using the power of superheros to summon hard cash from our wallets. Yet such an ability is exhaustible, and with the endless Superhero films ‘CRASH’ ‘BANG’ and ’WALLOP’ing to the screen, being super is becoming disappointingly normal.
Emma Geen
The film begins with misfit Andrew (Dane DeHaan), his cousin Matt (Alex Russell) and popular kid Steve (Michael B. Jordan), exploring a mysterious pothole. What they find there gives them powers that change their lives forever, but can they deal with the resultant responsibility?
Sounds interesting, yes? Unfortunately, Itchy didn’t need powers of divination to tell exactly how the story would pan out and by halfway through we were sat on the edge of our seats egging on, not the characters, but the director and scriptwriter. ‘Come on Josh Trank and Max Landis,’ we cried to the annoyance of our fellow cinema-goers ‘kick that cliché in the balls! You can do it! You can... OK, no, no you can’t…’
Don’t get us wrong, Chronicle is still an enjoyable experience - the visuals are beautiful, there’s some good chuckles, respectable performances all around, and the obscure device of telling the whole film through the medium of found footage is… well, mostly not cringe-worthy; yet the likes of Kick-Ass and Misfits can still K.O. Chronicle with the twitch of a finger.
Ever since the film industry was bitten by the radioactive bug of comic books it’s been using the power of superheros to summon hard cash from our wallets. Yet such an ability is exhaustible, and with the endless Superhero films ‘CRASH’ ‘BANG’ and ’WALLOP’ing to the screen, being super is becoming disappointingly normal.
Emma Geen
