The ends don't justify the middle

Rating: 3/10 (27 July 1999)

The beginning was kind of cute, and the end was okay, but that doesn't justify the long implausible episode of The Real World that we got in the middle.
I wanted to like this film, and I was really careful that my reaction would not be a backlash against the hype. I am pretty willing to suspend my disbelief for most things (like, I didn't even question if the house in The People Under The Stairs was plausible). But I just couldn't make the leap for the Blair Witch Project. I think that it was the premise that ultimately made it fail.
Because the characters in the BWP spent so much time and effort taping themselves react to things, at no time could I really believe that they were all that scared. I mean, if you were scared out of your wits, would you be peering cockeyed through a viewfinder, or would you use both eyes to look around?
Ah, but then, we wouldn't have a movie, would we?
The result is some unbelievable overreactions caught on tape and some eye-rolling situations, which made the entire movie as believable as an episode of Jerry Springer. It was as if the emotions were overplayed just for the camera or for a drama improvisation class. And, despite the "innovative" way of telling the story, that conceit, as realized by those actors, made the situation too implausible to be truly frightening.
Don't take the comparisons to Jerry Springer and the Real World to mean that this movie is bad. It's just that despite all the efforts to make the terror seem real, the BWP just fails to be genuine and believable.