Entertainment

Punk’d powers

As superhero movies have become a dominant cinematic genre in recent years, audiences have come to expect a certain story arc: regular Joe gets bitten by a radioactive honey badger (or whatever creature). Joe gains spectacular powers. Joe dons flattering spandex costume, fights crime and saves the world.

This weekend’s “Chronicle” offers a completely different take on the familiar genre. In it, three high-school students suddenly gain telekinetic powers that allow them to fly and move objects with their mind. But instead of using them for good, they use them mostly for pranks.

“If you’re a kid and you have telekinesis, you wouldn’t arbitrarily leave the house and fight crime and try to solve the world’s problems,” says director Josh Trank, who developed the story with screenwriter Max Landis. “You’d do what kids do, which is mess with people and have fun. Just mundane, ordinary stuff.”

So in “Chronicle,” there is no battle with the Green Goblin. (At least at the beginning.) Instead, we get the trio (relative unknowns Dane DeHaan, Michael B. Jordan and Alex Russell) goofing around with each other and using their powers to lift a cheerleader’s skirt, scare a little girl at a toy store by levitating a stuffed bear and prank a woman by moving her car in a parking lot.

“There isn’t anything heroic about these kids,” Trank says, “and if we’re making any comment on superhero movies in general, it’s that not everybody with super powers would take it upon themselves to become a hero.”

These guys take it upon themselves to eat Pringles without using their hands. Super Sodium?

The film uses “Blair Witch”-style “found footage” to tell most of the story. Its premise is that one of the teens has captured everything that’s shown on-screen with his personal digital camera, like a video diary.

“At the beginning, he’s filming because he’s trying to capture stuff that’s going on in his life,” Trank says. “Then he’s filming because he can do incredible stuff with his friends and he’d absolutely want to film it.”

The found footage conceit is sometimes difficult to make plausible for 90 minutes — Why were they still worried about filming in “Cloverfield” while being chased by a giant lizard? — but Trank says it’s not such a stretch.

“We live in a world where you can film anything you want to, at any time,” he says. “There is an emerging aesthetic from this generation. Kids in high school today are the most self-photographed people in history. Almost everyone has a camera in some form, and are uploading images every few seconds to social networking sites. So we’re seeing more films inspired by this new style of shooting.”

Tranks says that shooting in this style can also be a bit cheaper. “Chronicle” was reportedly made for a modest $15 million. The upcoming superhero extravaganza “The Avengers” probably spent more than that on Thor’s capes.

reed.tucker@nypost.com