Cloverfield” is what “The Blair Witch Project” would have
been if the witch were Godzilla. It’s pure handheld camera trickery, lots of
shouting, annoying confusion and a mother of an anticlimax. There’s even a
snot-dripping confessional.

The premise is simple: monster ravages city while boy braves
peril to save girl. That’s it. Eleven dollars please.

Spare us the emotion, the conflict between characters and
all morality; just run and shout amid smoke and debris instead. Aside from
F-17s dropping their payloads onto city streets, you can nix the violence too.
And what’s this about a monster? Miming old-school horror, director Matt Reeves
doesn’t offer a clear image of the creature until the end, giving us the end of
a tail just as it darts into shadow, or an elbow peeking out behind a building
amid pyrotechnics and smoke.

The flick aims to exploit the rise of user-submitted content
(a la Youtube) by telling the monster story solely through the eyes of a
camcorder. The scenes are edited to appear exactly as they would from a
recovered home video, and the acting isn’t acting as much as it is improvised
real life.

The problem is that the language of cinema demands a degree
of superficiality in order to come across as real, the same way that stage
actors wear way too much makeup in order to appear normal under blinding
theater lights. If the characters are too real to life — as they are in
“Cloverfield” — the allure of the film fails to materialize.

Watching home videos on Youtube may be entertaining for a
few minutes, but most people aren’t capable of staying logged on for long
hauls, much less for a 90-minute movie in a similar style. Without a good story
or intriguing characters, all that “Cloverfield” has left to ride on are its
special effects and action sequences, and the good ones are few and far
between.

The first 15 minutes of “Cloverfield” are a going-away party
experienced through the lens of an idiot trying to capture testimonials and hit
on girls. The shit hits the fan when something — we never do find out what —
crash lands in the city and starts hurling things, like the iconic head of the
Statue of Liberty, around.

From there we’re given an “inside the action” experience,
which obviously means lots of shaking and blurred movement, doing as much for a
queasy stomach as lemon juice would for a paper cut.

From fumbling with the lens and shooting his feet as he
walks, to dropping the camera all together as it rolls down the stairs, most of
the content is unwatchable while the rest is simply nauseating.

The only respite from the endless shaking is when our
cameraman is knocked unconscious for a moment, or puts the camera down long
enough to twist a piece of shrapnel from his best friend’s shoulder. For
explosions and chase scenes, the method of rattling the audience senseless
works well, but thankfully those are generally small doses.

Any more and it’s just a way of skimping on choreography. If
organizing a chase scene is too much for the cinematographer to bother himself
with, then he may turn to driving in circles and shaking the camera as much as
he can, hoping to create the illusion of action, i.e. “The Bourne Supremacy.”

But it’s a cheap parlor trick that won’t fool savvy
audiences; directors must be getting lazy — and naive — if they think this kind
of gimmickry will hold up for long.