Panic! At the Disco: LA Devotee (2016 Music Video) User Reviews

Over the top and not in a good way

[Horst_In_Translation · 2/10 · 13 April 2019]

"Panic! At the Disco: LA Devotee" is the title of this film / music video and you can read the name of the song in here as well as the name of the band. The ! is not helping matters here for me, sounds pretty try-hard. Anyway, it runs for minimally over 4 minutes, luckily this short and was released back in 2016. I checked the song and saw it was not a huge success. But still it is so much better than the music video. Kinda shocking to see even 2 people in charge here of directing. One of them goes by a one-word alias and worked mostly with Weezer, the other has made more music videos with P!AtD, but also worked a lot with Fall Out Boy. Now for their music video here, they got a kid from Stranger Things that does basically nothing but sit in a chair all the time and make wild movies, while realistically he would have surrender to the situation and his ties far more quickly, but yeah, even for such a short film it felt unrealistic. I have not seen Stranger Things yet, but he's gotta be a better actor than this right?? The singer from the band, Brendon Urie, is featured heavily in the description here, but yeah I must say I have no clue who he is and I don't feel like missing a lot not knowing him. We only see him on screen(²) anyway making bizarre grimaces and showing us his sadistically diabolical self. An actor he is not. That much is safe. In addition when other people are approaching the boy, cult members(?), and attempt to perform bizarre experiments on him, it does not elevate the material either. Same for the dead animals and other metaphors involving blood-soaked skulls. As for the music and singing, it is always difficult and a real challenge to add a voice to a character showing him singing when it is clearly not his own voice and avoid to look really stupid in such a scenario. Here they did not with these moments in the first half of the video. It is a true mess from beginning to end and I highly not recommend checking this one out. If you are still curious, go for the song only without the music video. That one is not as bad as all you see in here, doesn't mean it's good either. Plain mediocre and the title does not fit at all. Big thumbs-down for this project from me.