Prank

Prank is the story of two bullied geeks and their sometime friend, a chubby girl with the unlikely name of "Chunk", who decide to pull a prank on their two tormentors.

This is all filmed with a semi-broken camcorder that one of them is always using to film the action. A few pranks are planned but nothing really pans out.

Here is where my criticism of the movie begins. Most of the dialogue seems forced. Chunk's dialogue in particular is so stupid that it takes you out of the movie. Every other sentence she utters concludes with the word "man."

All of the characters are portrayed as stereotypes, from the black man to the geek to the bully etc. This becomes grating after a while. Nothing interesting happens for long periods of time, and then one of the characters has a total personality change and at least some things start to happen.

What does happen, though, isn't really that interesting, as we don't really care for any of these unsympathetic people or their actions.

There are a couple of things that do happen in the last 15 minutes or so that save this from being a total waste. I would have voted a 1 had it not been for a couple of semi-interesting twists.

When Pranks go bad - or are they going bad? What was the plan again? Now the main theme of the movie is really an interesting one and it may be the basis why the ratings are all over the place for this. Almost everyone has experienced bullying, either as a victim or as a perpetrator. Most have been the former of course and may feel for the main characters here.

Still liking the theme/story does not make it a better movie than it is. The found footage aspect I guess is supposed to draw some people in (and making it more "personal"), but it also is quite annoying. Like it or not, it is pretty straighforward and you will be able to determine if you want to continue to watch or not ...

Potentially, this film could have been a seriously disturbing flick. The reason it failed in my eyes wasn't because of the hand-held cam, it wasn't even that the acting was extremely dreadful, as it was in fact acceptable enough. When taking on a subject like this, there should be one major goal in the filmmakers minds of the utmost importance, make the story as realistic & believable as possible no matter what the cost, this just didn't occur.

The story consists of three social outcast nerds who, after years of abuse & bullying, decide it's time to stand up & turn the tables on one particular bully named Dax. It's the summer before their senior year and they feel as though maybe, if done correctly, this prank will redeem them in the eyes of their fellow classmates and possibly win the affection of a certain girl who one of them happens to have a crush on. Of course all of this is to be filmed & posted on the internet in hopes of a colossal payday which will finance the other boy's dream of hitting thirteen Star Trek conventions in a row, yes, lame indeed. Which brings me to another area of the film in which I felt was just lazy & completely unimaginative, the cardboard, cookie-cutter characters of the three nerds. They adhered to making them the most clichéd bunch of geeks ever concocted. Which was ultimately forgivable when looking at the big picture and the overall effect in which they were sequentially reaching for, to make the viewer uncomfortable, unsettled and inherently disturbed. A goal that was just not met.

I won't go into specifics of the plot that I felt led to the overall downfall of the film's believability, but I will say that the prank within a prank was not concealed well, it was completely obvious to me and it crippled the film's credibility beyond repair. The plot became completely disjointed & ultimately contradicted the premise set forth in the beginning. I know what they were reaching for here because I've seen it accomplished in other films quite well, where the viewer becomes immersed into the story and is left shocked & disturbed at the film's end because it was in fact so believable, not so in this case. I don't recommend wasting your time with this.

When this one came out here in Europe it was immediately sold for a few Euro's. That made me pick up this Blu Ray guess it was 2 or 3 Euro's and the cover looked promising.

The story is very simple. After being bullied for years it's time for revenge and a prank is set-up. But you have to sit throughout almost the whole flick to see the prank. It takes over 40 minutes before the red stuff comes in and things go awry you think. But two minutes later we are back to blah blah and that's exactly what we do have here. A lot of talking. The only thing I started watching was Connor's T-shirts. They were mostly funny. I could stand up to the hand held camera and the shaky movements. Yes, another found footage flick. But an extreme boring one. I just kept watching it to see of something would happen in stead of talking, it didn't.

Gore 0/5 Nudity 0/5 Effects 0/5 Story 1/5 Comedy 0/5

PRANK is a found-footage film which records the attempts of a geek and a nerd, both high school students, to exact revenge on the former's bully and tormentor by means of a prank, which leads to unforeseen consequences.

I like found-footage movies, and the prank angle was, at least to me, a fresh take on the genre, not too mention that bullying in schools is a real-life topical issue. Indeed, while the acting was mostly stilted and the whole set-up seemed a tad too theatrical, the movie did manage to bring enough credibility to the table to at least draw me in.

What a disappointment then the plot twist in the third act was! Given the backgrounds of the two protagonists, it was simply not believable what one of them would end up doing. After the twist, it felt like events were simply happening in the service of a highly contrived plot, and I could easily predict the ending.

I guess there is an art to creating good plot twists: on the one hand, they cannot be too obvious, and on the other, they can't be so implausible or illogical that they cause the whole story to fall apart. There might have been a way to execute this twist in a believable manner, but it would have required the character in question to be drawn in a different way and a change in some earlier scenes which are not consistent with it.

Ironically, the plot twist makes absolutely no difference to what seems to be the central lesson of the movie "be careful for what you wish to happen to your bully". A better plot twist would have actually had a point.