PROJECT ALMANAC (2014)

Have loved time travel films since watching Rod Taylor in The Time Machine as a kid.  Even as the credits started rolling for Project Almanac and I saw "MTV Films", I still had high hopes.  David Raskin (Jonny Weston) is a science geek in suburban Atlanta whose biggest dream is to get into MIT.  He's over the moon when he makes it but then learns $40K of the tuition isn't covered by scholarship, and in his efforts to find a way to raise more money comes across a videotape of his seventh birthday party (the day his father died) ... where he spots a glimpse of his adult self in a mirror.  He and his friends discover his father had started working on a time machine, which they complete, and though at first things are great eventually bad choices lead to disaster (big surprise).  The shaky-cam "found footage" stuff here is bad enough, some viewers will likely be made sick watching, and while a good effort the ending is flat and co-producer Michael Bay certainly leaves his mark with cool special effects and set pieces over developing characters we care about. (rated PG-13)  C+