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‘Chronicle’ turns the found-footage genre into a superhero

Movie Review

THIS STORY APPEARED IN

February 03, 2012|By Ty Burr

From left: Michael B. Jordan, Dane DeHaan, and Alex Russell play students… (ALAN MARKFIELD/20TH CENTURY…)

Thirteen years after “The Blair Witch Project’’ kicked it off, the found-footage genre is finally expanding its boundaries beyond ghost stories (“Paranormal Activity’’), monsters (“Cloverfield’’), and demons (“The Devil Inside’’). That’s right, “Chronicle’’ is a found-footage superhero movie. Can a shaky-cam musical be far behind? How about a YouTube-ready biblical epic? (“Moses! Turn off the camera, already!’’)

“Chronicle’’ will never be mistaken for an artistic breakthrough, but it has a solid gimmick and pieces of it are brilliant. Told mostly (we’ll get to that in a bit) through the video-camera lens of a pasty Seattle high school loser named Andrew (Dane DeHaan), the film “documents’’ the aftermath of his encounter with a mysteriously glowing space rock. Along with friends and fellow discoverers Matt (Alex Russell) and Steve (Michael B. Jordan), Andrew realizes he can levitate objects and possesses super-human strength. He can even soar through the air.

All of this is presented with the rough-and-ready disbelief of kids hacking around with a camera after school. What would you do if you could fly? You’d play touch football in the clouds, of course. The super-power Andrew comes to appreciate most is his newfound popularity: Matt and Steve are BMOCs (the former a handsome intellectual, the latter the glad-handing class politician), and in their company he blossoms socially. No more hallway beatings and sneers from the cheerleaders.

In the cruel Darwinian calculus of “Chronicle,’’ though, once a dork means always a dork, and Andrew begins to contemplate darker uses for his gifts. Directed by Josh Trank and written by Trank and Max Landis (John’s son), the movie throws a lot of influences into its pot, including “Carrie’’ (the hero has a drunken lout of a dad, played by Michael Kelly), “The Invisible Man,’’ and real-life high school rampages. These elements combine both queasily and cleverly, and somewhere around the midpoint we realize that Andrew is shaping up to be the movie’s super-villain.