Project Almanac - D

Rated PG-13, 106 minutes
Wes's Grade: D

Time-traveling "Project Almanac" is found-footage at its most annoying

Thank you, Michael Bay for another headache due to a movie of yours. Bay is one of the producers of the new sci-fi, found footage film "Project Almanac,"which involves teens, time travel and a real test of your faith if you sit through this sloppy dreck posing as a movie. It definitely plays to the MTV crowd, who may enjoy all the chatter and jumpy edits, but the rest of us may have to reach for some Dramamine. A group of friends (Jonny Weston, Sofia Black D'Elia, Sam Lerner, Allen Evangelista and Virginia Gardner) discover plans to build a time machine and then build one themselves. They use the time machine initially to undo past mistakes, and eventually their goals turn towards their own gain and pleasure but soon realize that changing the past has dire consequences in the future which hurts some people along the way. Directed by Dean Isrealite and co-written by Jason Harry Pagan and Andrew Deutschman, "Project Almanac" has some energy and a decent premise, but it's never fully realized amidst all the jumping around, and the thin premise is only underscored by the fact that it takes so long (at least for the first full hour of the movie) for these boneheads to really do anything. Worst of all, it plays to the biggest weakness of the found footage films in the first place, and that is the irritating, exceeding and unecessarily jumpy editing that makes it feel like the movie is all over the place, and not just with the thin story; it became so annoying I had really trouble following it because I was simply dizzy with all the camera movements. "Project Almanac" has more holes you can jump through, and the special-effects are pretty low grade too, but then expectations may not be high for something like this. Shot in 2013 and sitting on the shelf for two years, it should've stayed there. For a better, similarily-themed found footage movie (a mixture of teens and sci-fit), rent the 2012 movie "Chronicle." This one is definitely one to skip.