Oct 052006
 
three reels

Four teenage boys, Caleb, Pogue, Tyler, and Reid (Steven Strait, Taylor Kitsch, Chace Crawford, Toby Hemingway), all students at an elite boarding school, have inherited the magic of their families.  They can do almost anything, but trouble appears in the form of a member of the long missing fifth family.  He wants more power, and is willing to kill Caleb’s and Pogue’s girlfriends (Laura Ramsey, Jessica Lucas) to get it.

Flashy and screaming just how hip it is, The Covenant is teen-friendly witchcraft for The O.C. generation.  Pretty seventeen-year-olds (the actors are twenty to twenty-six) fill the screen, dressed to be cool and ready to rock out.  Oh, there’s a plot, but it takes second fiddle to chiseled abs.  This might be a movie, or it might be  shampoo and clothing commercials, strung together with state-of-the-art computer effects.  Plus there’s homoerotic group showering and girls chatting in their panties.  It’s sex, PG-13 style.

All that might make you think this light-as-air piece of new millennium Wicca-action-horror is a disaster, but it’s not.  It shoots low, and hits its mark.  The people are supposed to be pretty, and they are.  The soundtrack is supposed to be heavy and cool, and it is.  The effects are supposed to wow, and they do.  The general storyline isn’t embarrassing, and the acting is well above teen horror level (again, not exactly a high mark).

As long as you aren’t expecting Shakespeare, and can’t get enough of faux-teen culture, there isn’t anything wrong with what’s on screen.  The only real problems are what’s missing.  The characters are barely developed; for the first fifteen minutes I couldn’t tell our heroes apart from several of their classmates, and by movies end I didn’t know most of them any better.  Worse, the rules and limits of magic are hardly mentioned.  It’s impossible to know if a situation is dangerous since the four’s powers can, at times, deal with extreme situations (getting smashed by a semi), while it sputters at lesser trials (falling off a motorcycle).  Is the film inconsistent?  Nope.  To be inconsistent, there’s got to be some sort of normalcy established.  Inconsistency would be an improvement.

The climax feels as if several script pages were lost.  I kept waiting for the members of The Covenant to reveal their brilliant plan.  I’m still waiting.  Perhaps that was a way of making a statement about how high school students fail to properly prepare for important events in their lives.  Or perhaps it is an indication that writer J.S. Cardone and director Renny Harlin weren’t prepared when filming began.

An underwritten male version of The Craft, with influences from The Lost Boys and Dark City (magic warfare consists of bolts, balls, and waves of transparent energy rippling across the frame), The Covenant is the really hot, but dim and shallow chick that you meet at a bar when your cash is low.  You’re not going to get anywhere with her, and she has nothing to say, but she’s not bad to look at for an hour or so.

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