Due to an unfortunate series of circumstances, I wasn’t actually able to watch a movie yesterday. So just a quick post today about the movie I’m watching as I type, and I’ll try and rebuild my buffer on my next day off.

When my friends and I were younger, our interest in a movie was pretty much reliant on the quantity of hot guys and the caliber of their hotness. As a result, when a friend of mine was on a Toby Maguire kick, she and I ended up watching The Covenant. I wound up buying a copy, again because of the hot guy factor, but I haven’t really watched it since then.

Two things are very very apparent to me right off the bat. First, the premise of the film is actually pretty interesting, although executed rather poorly. The idea of a modern Salem-esque story, complete with witchhunt, appeals to my sensibilities on several different levels. The fake-outs, the foreshadowing, the mystery, the “Sons of Ipswitch” boy band, it’s all just short of over-dramatic and therefore super fun. But a lot of the exposition is made through clunky dialogue delivered in rather poor performances. The best actor in the film would actually go on to become the Winter Soldier, but the next best actor hasn’t had a major role in years. Not to mention the fact that I think the entire thing is one giant anti-drugs metaphor.

The other thing that sticks out is the sound. There’s this odd quality to all of the sound in the film; it’s as though none of the recorded dialogue was usable and they had to ADR every slice of dialogue and foley every sound effect. The score is actually quite lovely, but the popular soundtrack is kind of overkill, often drowning out lines of varying importance. It makes it kind of hard to take anything in the film seriously when everything is too clean-sounding and the words and mouths don’t always quite match up.

Still, all of that aside, The Covenant is a pretty fun coming-of-age film. It suffers from the usual very-obviously-an-adult-playing-a-teenager phenomenon, but if you can get over that and the sound, as I said, the premise is pretty unique. It’s got its fair share of problems, but I’d say it’s a solid B movie.