It's like The Craft, only with boys

The Movie: The Covenant, directed by Renny Harlin
Reccomendation: Broomie
Reason: See the review title.

Picture this. It's 1998. They're making The Craft 2. They cast Joshua Jackson, Shane West, Devon Sawa and Seth Green as boy witches. As a villian, they've chosen...I dunno, Barry Watson. They rip the plot from The Craft, but make it with boys this time. Things explode. Fairuza Balk and Neve Campbell make a cameo appearance, possibly playing wise mentors or older sisters to the young warlocks. A good time is had by all. That's the movie I was imagining in my head when I first heard word of The Covenant. That is not the movie I saw tonight.

There are a lot of things wrong with The Covenant. The leads are uncharismatic and cannot act. The lead girl was a shining example of how to take the audience entirely out of the movie with a poor performance. None of the characters were distinct enough to care about-even the villain managed to be both unsympathetic and completely moronic. The plot was muddled and pointless. The camera work was distracting and the special effects were awful. While I was imagining Joshua Jackson snarling the lead's lines, putting up his dukes and maybe throwing around some fireballs, the lead was actually whipping around bad liquid effects. Also, the whole 'jumping off a really high thing and landing in a crouch, then walking off like a total badass' was badass when Kate Beckinsdale did it in Underworld, in 2003. It is no longer badass, even when you do it three times in one movie.

As you can tell, I didn't like the flick. It was pretty subpar, so I'll stick with my imagined movie full of 90's Teenbeat coverboys who could actually occasionally act, instead of 2000's crop of whiny emoboys. And I would've totally cast Claire Danes as the lead girl. That's just how I roll.

-8/365 down, 357/365 to go