Chronicle

Another delayed review here at 5am: Chronicle hit the dollar theater this week so I ended up checking it out on a whim, hell it was only 75 cents, so here goes nothing:

I remember seeing previews for this when it first came out and kind of liked the vague premise, and what I gathered was that three guys found something in the ground, got powers and someone went postal and freaked out. Well, that's it folks.

Chronicle begins with a haggard Leonardo DiCaprio looking guy attempting to record everything in his life: his drunken father's beatings, his bullying at school, the cheerleaders during practice, etc. and as a result we find Andrew (Dane DeHaan) getting treated like anyone would if they lugged around an old ass camcorder to public high school: shit on constantly. We see that Andrew's life is pretty shitty: his dad's an abusive drunk, his mom is dying from a terminal disease, and Andrew isn't quite the stud, and with this new pussy-killing camcorder life just sucks ass for Andrew. Whilst driving to school with his cousin Matt (Alex Russell) he is prodded into going to a party in the woods later, and of course the retard brings the camera. While at the party he almost gets his ass beat for videoing some guy's slutty girlfriend dancing and so he is reduced to tears outside the [arty. As he is cleaning the spit and shit off his camera the class president and all around hotshot Steve (Michael B. Jordan) comes around stoked about something demanding that he come film it. After being coaxed he is dragged through the woods and is greeted with his cousin Matt and a sketchy ass hole in the ground. Steve decides to be an idiot and dives into the hole, with Matt following and eventually Andrew, The trio trek through the elaborate cave-like hole and eventually discover some foreign object embedded in the ground, and by object I mean a neon teal glass starfish with wriggly shit inside it, it's kind of stupid looking actually and not scary at all, but I digress. As the teens overlook the object it begins to shake and turn colors and suddenly the camera freaks out and things go black. The camera turns back on now, in much better quality and we see the guys figuring out their new telekinetic powers in their backyard. The next 30 or so minutes consist of the guys perfecting their powers, discovering their ability to fly and Andrew's steady rise in popularity. Well one night comes and the guys are all at a party, and Andrew's about to get laid, everyone's stoked and just when things are about to happen Andrew barfs on the ugly ass girl he's about to bone, to which he gets pissed and alienates himself from his friends and retreats back to the social outcast with the freaky video camera taping everything. Andrew begins to change, killing spiders in his room like an angsty badass and soon we see that Andrew is fed up with everything, and one day while being an emo bitch up in the clouds (during a thunderstorm) Steve finds him being a little girl and tries to help, which Andrew pushes away, gets pissy and kills Steve by conducting a massive lightning bolt near him, killing him. The remaining two superfreaks attend Steve's funeral and Matt realizes something is up, so he questions the reclusive Andrew and is met with resistance and Andrew flies off. Now Andrew's mom's health is getting super shitty, and the family is so poor they can't afford the medicine, so of course like a dumbass Andrew resorts to stealing, which after killing the local bullies he gets the balls to rob a gas station. As Andrew is leaving the gas station the attendant comes out and attempts to shoot him, as Andrew reflects the gunshot it hits the gas tank near by and the whole place goes up in flames, placing Andrew in ICU covered with burns. As Andrew sits in the ICU his drunk father comes in and tells the comatose Andrew that his mother died that night and that it is his fault she's dead because his father was out looking for his dumb ass instead of taking care of her. In a fit of rage Andrew awakens and blows the room to shit, and miles away Matt gets some feeling that something is up and aided by a news report that some bombastic shit is happening downtown he rushes to Andrew's aid and tries to calm the pussy down. When he gets to the hospital, which is still on fire and smoking he sees Andrew attempt to drop his passed out father out of the building, and Matt flies up and saves him. Pissed off Andrew flies off like the little girl he is and the next 10 minutes are spent seeing the two fight and destroy buildings. After breaking all kinds of shit, killing people and being an overall douchebag Andrew is impaled by his cousin Matt via a statue's spear. The movie concludes with Matt flying to Tibet, a place Andrew wanted to visit, and saying his final goodbye to his dead cousin, and the scene ends with him leaving his video camera running facing the snow capped Tibetan domes.  

So let's break it down: Action quality, Plot quality, Character quality, and Artistic quality.

Action Quality: The action was alright, some shit blew up at the end, you saw people flying and you saw a spider get ripped apart in mid air, but that's about it. There was nothing too mind blowing about this flick, and granted it's not a terrible movie, it just didn't live up to what I had imagined the movie to possess.

Plot Quality: I don't really know how I feel about the plot, I mean the beginning was a little too long, you can show a high school loser pretty easily, and the movie seemed to drag on and on and on during the middle sections, so it's far from perfect. I also dislike how there was no real explanation of the object they found in the hole, like all we got was that the cops were shutting it down at the beginning, but that was it. And really, if there was an alien/government secret underground people walking directly over it would have been "taken care of", not shooed off the grounds. There were some plot holes, some poorly executed scenarios and some underdeveloped ideas, but there was also a kind of neat premise and overall things made sense, you just had to watch it with your dumb unskeptical hat on.

Character Quality: I disliked the entire cast, all the people were annoying and I just hated them for some reason. As actual characters I fucking haaated Andrew, okay I get it you're a loser, calm the fuck down. I feel like they could have toned down his character's angst and it would have flowed better. It was almost like a real life Akira, except not awesome and embarrassing. Matt was just a bumbling idiot the entire time and you couldn't take him seriously ever and Steve was just a show off loud dick. The rest of the cast was so minor it didn't matter, but again, I didn't like the casting choices one bit, and the characters themselves didn't really do much for me, I was rooting for them all to die, but alas my wish wasn't totally granted.

Artistic Quality: I am so over "found footage" movies, and that's all this movie is, it's a collection of different video sources that tell the event; be it a cell phone camera, surveillance footage, or a video camera, 95% of the movie is shot this way and it's just annoying at this point, there was no real need to keep it up the way the film makers did. The CGI too was pretty shitty, like whenever the guys used their telekinetic powers to move something the effects were super dodgy and it just didn't project well on the screen, however the scenes where the guys fly through the sky is pretty tits, I won't lie. There's a fair amount of explosions and such and there are some cool scenes here and there so it's not all bad, I just don't care much for the majority of CGI stuff.

With all that said Chronicle wasn't a bad movie, it blends some already established ideas into a somewhat new idea and shows how with power people will turn into small dicked assholes. If you have nothing better to do I say watch this once and give it a try, but I doubt I'll ever watch this again when it hits cable, but on the same token I'm glad I saw it, so I give it an 'alright' rating.

SHIT MOVIE RATING: ALRIGHT