With great power comes the responsibility to make a decent movie, but the mysterious force running through “Chronicle” is the power to supersuck.
Attempting to blend a cinematic smoothie out of “The Blair Witch Project” and “Superman,” the movie instead feels more like what would happen if “Jackass” suddenly started thinking it was about the nature of evil, with Johnny Knoxville mouthing quotations from Schopenhauer and Jung.
Shot with the poor framing, a shaky camera and sudden technical glitches of dozens of other faux documentaries, “Chronicle” purports to be the video diary of teen loner Andrew (Dane DeHaan), his philosophizing cousin and sole friend, Matt (Alex Russell), and their school’s coolest dude, Steve (Michael B. Jordan). After a party, they stumble upon what looks like a mine shaft, which contains a radioactive meteorite from the planet Cliché. Touch it, and you gain superpowers including telekinesis and the ability to fly. You may think sci-fi writers could come up with something fresh instead of constantly rearranging the same dozen moldy ingredients, but if so, you’ll never get a job at a movie studio.
The boys, who even by teen standards are dull (the screenwriters gave each one quality — popular, nerdy, bookish — then quit, presumably before lunch), can’t seem to come up with anything to do with their superpowers. Do they go to a casino and fix the slots? No. Turn themselves into local Le-Brons? No. Here is what they do: levitate Legos (the actors look about 24. Legos? Really?), toss some Pringles into their mouths and use a leaf-blower to flip up a girl’s skirt. Fully halfway through the movie, when you expect them to be well on their way to ridding the world of evil, or at least flying themselves into the grotto at the Playboy Mansion, they’re . . . doing card tricks and juggling routines. They play beer pong. Because that’s the best way they can think of to impress their classmates. Did I mention these are the three most powerful human beings on the planet?
Amid the general goofing-off, there is a cute scene that gives a sense of how amusing it must be to be able to fly (and how likely it is that a teen boy would overdo it to the point of nearly getting himself killed). There’s also an intriguing hint of darkness and moral complication when the boys consider whether they might have to institute a code of conduct, lest they use their powers to evil ends.
That idea leads nowhere, though: One character, for barely detectable reasons, just goes over to the dark side in much the same way the Krusty the Clown doll went bad on “The Simpsons”: because someone had flipped his good/evil switch to evil. Suddenly an innocent car is getting telekinetically scrunched, and there’s a lot of glowering and muttering about the deliciousness of being the nastiest dude in town, or the “Apex predator.” Cue lots of Superman versus General Zod gags, with the villain and hero flying around while hurling large objects at each other.
We see all this refracted through a jumble of security cameras and eyewitness videography, though when the film needs a professional-looking close-up, it simply throws one in and hopes you won’t think too much about where it’s supposedly coming from. Thanks to the blandness of the characters and the cheapness of the effects, though, you won’t be thinking about anything much, except maybe where to eat after the movie.