Amber Alert (2012)

It's getting to the point where making fun of and/or ripping apart the average Found Footage/POV horror flick is like picking on the slow kid in class; the slow kids can't defend themselves, and it's usually a complete asshole who picks on the defenseless.

While I would never pick on anyone who is defenseless in real life, I really have no choice but to be the asshole when it comes to the slow kids of the horror world.

Amber Alert might be the worst movie I've seen all year, and that's saying a lot.

The premise of this movie is a truly great one, and done well, could make for one hell of a FF flick. As it stands, this movie is not much more than frustrating.

Nate and Sam are two wacky friends who are out and about making an audition tape for some reality TV show that they want to be on. Nate is the pudgy, doting best friend who is secretly in love with Sam. Sam is the cute, thin girl who keeps Nate in the friend-zone, because she has no interest in him whatsoever, but can still get him to be her bitch on command.

How fun are they?

While driving down the highway, taping everything for their audition, they come across an Amber Alert on a freeway billboard. True terror sets in when they realize, about ten seconds after seeing the alert, that the car in front of them is the car mentioned in the Amber Alert! Even truer terror sets in when we get to witness two of the dumbest people in existence argue back and forth for the next 70 minutes.

These are the aforementioned two people.

They follow the car, alert the police who are busy doing something more important to investigate, and they even walk up to the car in a gas station to get a better look. Sam sees the girl in the backseat, and instead of breaking the window and grabbing her, she drops a microphone in the car, and they follow they driver some more. And argue some more. And do things that no one who isn't mentally retarded would ever do.

This movie should have been called Screaming Alert.

Finally the cops show up! Of course after being told to go to the Sheriff's station and hand over the tape that they have and give a statement, Sam decides that they should keep looking, and Nate the pussy whines about it, but does her bidding. Worst of all, her reasoning is so weak, that as bad as this movie has been so far it just became painfully worse. Its obvious that shes a moron, and homeboy should have told her to shut the fu*k up, but then again that's why they're friends; she's in control. That's also why he's in the friend-zone, because he deserves to be there.

Dude, move on.

Darkness falls, and they lose their quarry. Somehow though, Sam catches wind of an address (?!?), Googles it, and they head there to investigate. It's his house! Wow, she's good. So then they break inside, search the ramshackle home in the dark, and find some guns... and they keep searching.

Then it ends, like every other FF flick seems to end, and we breathe a sigh of relief.

OMG I found him on the Google!

It ended.

Plot points, and the ridiculous nature of their failure; that's the clinic that Amber Alert put on for us. This movie fails to make sense on such a massive scale, that it really felt like a middle finger from the people who made it.

- The amber alert is broadcast on a billboard while our main characters are driving down the highway, and 10 seconds later the driver is like "isn't that the car right there?" Now, the driver was feverishly talking to and paying attention to the chick in the passenger seat, they pass under the amber alert doing average highway speed, so how did he know what it said? Did he really read that sign, absorb its content, and have time to process it so quick, all in the midst of a lively discussion?

- So they call the cops, and say they see the car with the alleged kidnapped kid inside, and the police say they have a lot of calls and they wont be there for 15 minutes? Wouldn't they stay on the phone? A lot of calls or not, wouldn't police investigate a call in which someone says "We see the guy right in front of us!" first?

Kill him now!

-If this is a found footage tape, how is the licence plate blurred and why is the swearing bleeped out?
Raw footage? So the Cops edited this "real" tape, to highlight their ineptitude and culpability in the events of the kidnapping and attempted rescue?

- This movie is full of people doing things that no one in their right mind would ever do. I could see following a car if you really thought there was a kidnapped child inside, but I would have been on the phone with the cops until they showed up. I'd lie to get them to show up. And for the record, if I'm driving the car, and some witless banshee she-bitch in the passenger insists on screaming at me the whole time, the car trip would be over in very short order. Then again, I don't have a vagina like Nate apparently did.

Shut up or walk, issue solved.

I can barely read that, and it's a still image from a movie trailer.

In many FF flicks, the main issues are believability and characters, and their lack of quality. In Amber Alert, we are presented with what may be the two worst, most annoying characters we've seen in recent memory. The girl in this is seriously the most annoying and moronic bitch ever. I can't fathom how anyone would write a character like her, and think that she'd be compelling in the least.

The protagonists were so annoying, and their constant arguing so distracting, that I never once felt any sort of dread about their situation or the kidnapping. Even when Sam drops a microphone through the window of the car they're following (?!?), and we hear the creepy guy talking menacingly to the scared child in his backseat, it evoked nothing. I cheered for the creeper to kill the heroes. That's bad.

Hipster? Hispter.

Amber Alert has a truly great premise for a Found Footage flick, but makes a total mess out of it. This movie is more about two people arguing and bickering incessantly than it is about two people following a guy who may have a kidnapped kid. The characters are horrible annoying, the local police are horribly inept, and not one thing in the movie makes any sort of rational sense whatsoever.

If you're looking to watch a movie that will leave you pissed off and wanting to punch things, this is your flick.