“What a Waste”

“Hotshots” looks at a movie!

 

Chronicle is another one of those movies in which the gimmick is that the audience sees what the characters in the movie have recorded themselves with a camera, and yet we see footage from more than one camera and even footage from surveillance cameras, as well.

Right. What is the point of the gimmick, especially when such extraordinary lengths have to be taken to be able to show the person behind the camera, like, for example, when he is flying up in the air high enough to almost get hit by a passing airliner?

At the beginning of the movie, we meet Andrew, a high-school senior, and he establishes the gimmick when he sets up a camera on a tripod in his bedroom and then says to his drunken father outside the door, “I bought a camera, and I’m filming everything from here on out.”

Andrew takes the camera to school with him and keeps it recording while he is eating lunch by himself on the bleachers at the football field, and we see him creep out the cheerleaders who are practicing their routines and also see him get picked on by bullies.

Now, any intelligent person in the audience is going to figure out that this is going to play a part later in the movie. You guess which one.

Andrew has a cousin named Matt, and Matt tells Andrew not to take his camera with them when they go to a party together, but naturally Andrew doesn’t listen.

While they are at the party, Matt and another friend of theirs named Steve find something out in the woods, and they tell Andrew to come out and get it on tape.

It is a large hole with a loud unusual noise coming up out of it, Steve falls in the hole, and Matt and Andrew, who keeps the camera with him, of course, go down into the hole after Steve.

We don’t see what is in the hole, and the movie cuts to a different day when we see that the three boys have unusual powers that they are trying out and practicing, powers that allow them to manipulate objects with just their minds, and they learn that they can increase their abilities with practice.

So, do they do good or evil?

Chronicle is a total waste.

I’m Dan Culberson and this is “Hotshots.”