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Nowhere Boys: The Book of Shadows: reviews

In cinemas today, but early reviews are already divided on the Nowhere Boys film.

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A big screen version of Nowhere Boys gets a limited release in cinemas today, Nowhere Boys: The Book of Shadows.

It will also screen on ABC later this year, along with another series.

There aren’t too many reviews out as yet, in fact I could only find 2, both via the Sydney Morning Herald.

The reviews (one of which is miraculously dated January 3 2016) also differ, with one giving it 3 stars and the other 1.5 stars.

Sydney Morning Herald: (Craig Mathieson)
Created by Tony Ayres (The Slap, Cut Snake), the two seasons of Nowhere Boys successfully captured their hard-to-recruit target audience – 10- to 14-year-old boys more likely to turn on a gaming console than a television set. The movie, co-written by Ayres, doesn’t deviate greatly from what’s previously worked: sturdy plotting and committed performances that honour some cheerfully cheap digital effects……The four leads get a fitting send-off (just in time: they’re old enough to start playing Nowhere Men) that emphasises the fraternal bond, fans get a welcome finale, and newcomers to the franchise get a pleasing school holiday movie and the promise of a rebooted television series. The real magic here is how Tony Ayres smartly wove all these divergent elements together.

Sydney Morning Herald: (Jake Wilson)
…the barely feature-length Nowhere Boys: The Book of Shadows is a letdown, a thoroughly televisual treatment of a bog-standard premise that could have been used by local “content providers” any time in the last three decades. The Nowhere Boys are a quartet of high schoolers with extra-dimensional powers that only work properly when all four are united — a scenario that leads to conflict, especially now that group members are getting interested in girls……Pricey digital effects are kept to a minimum, and the magical confrontations, staged in non-descript patches of bushland, can hardly be described as “action sequences” in the modern sense. At times the homeliness has a charm of its own, as when a magical gesture makes a row of wheelie bins all fly open at once. But this is hardly the kind of thing likely to impress modern kids for very long.

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