“SPRING BREAKERS” My rating: C+ (Now playing wide)
93 minutes | MPAA rating: R
I’m going to give filmmaker Harmony Korine the benefit of the doubt and argue that his college-coeds-on-a-grand-Florida-debauch epic “Spring Breakers” is more than just exploitation, that behind its lurid face it has some serious stuff on its mind.
At least for now. That could change.
This spring break yarn, told with jittery methhead editing, blaring rap and a veritable cornucopia of pulsating navels and breasts, begins with four childhood friends – played by Disney Channel veterans Vanessa Hudgens and Selena Gomez, Ashley Benson (of ABC Family’s “Pretty Little Liars”) and Rachel Korine (the filmmaker’s wife) – sitting around their nearly empty college campus and grousing because they haven’t enough money to go on spring break to Florida.
(For the record, their campus has palm trees, so it’s not like they’re stuck in some icebound New England hellhole or anything.)
Three of these young women, whose names I never caught (names aren’t important here…nor is character development or common sense), decide to make a quick buck by disguising themselves in ski masks and matching pink sweatshirts and robbing a local all-night restaurant with realistic-looking squirtguns. They really get into the deception, threatening and abusing diners like veteran psychopaths.
Evidently all those first-person-shooter video games are paying off.
Joined by their fourth member, Faith (played by Gomez), who attends a campus Christian meeting and seems to have the only moral compass in sight, they hit a southbound party bus. Next thing you know they’re dancing on the beach, doing shots and snorts and waving their ladyparts in the faces of horny college guys.
They have so much fun they get arrested in a police raid on a drug-saturated motel room. They are bailed out by a local rapper/drug kingpin who calls himself Alien (James Franco, resplendent with stainless steel choppers, facial tats and cornrowed hair). He politely requests their companionship for the remainder of their stay.
For all the documentary-style footage of the college crowd getting their party on, “Spring Breakers” is utterly unrealistic. The women are basically ciphers defined by their bodies… and just how many college girls are up for armed robbery, anyway?
Franco’s Alien is a true left field creation, but the actor is having so much fun with this drawling, sleazy/charming reprobate that he immediately becomes the picture’s center. Franco is at his best when allowed to portray really crazy characters, and Alien almost makes up for his thoroughly inadequate turn in Disney’s “Oz the Great and Powerful.”
Anyway, as the film becomes increasingly more surreal poor Faith freaks out on the growing atmosphere of violence and catches a bus for home. The girl played by Mrs. Korine (who, by the way, is the only one to have a nude scene…some marital counseling seems in order) gets winged in a confrontation with one of Alien’s rival drug lords (Gucci Mane) and is soon heading north.
That leaves the the Benson and Hudgens characters to hang with Alien in his obviously expensive but spectacularly tasteless beachside mansion. We’re led to believe that they actually fall for Alien (hey, he serenades them with the white grand piano sitting beside his swimming pool) and enjoy a ménage a trois. But really, this is only a prelude to a sort of “Wild Bunch” massacre in which they arm themselves to the teeth (while wearing matching bikinis and ski masks) and go gunning for a rival gang.
It looks to me as though Korine (he wrote Larry Clark’s pubescent hair raiser “Kids” and wrote and directed the astoundingly weird “Gummo”) is trying to say something about the ethical emptiness of a generation of young people reared on “Girls Gone Wild” videos and gangster rap.
But I’m not sure. Korine also seems to be celebrating the same group’s nihilism, as if in the empty land of 21st-century America destroying and being destroyed is just the way it goes and you might as well throw yourself in completely. By that reckoning there are worse things than going down like a modern-day Bonnie and Clyde.
Problem is, Korine muddles his message to the point that you don’t know what he’s trying to put across.
Which leave “Spring Breakers” a fiercely energetic, visually kinetic sensory experience, but not much more.
| Robert W. Butler
Easy for me to “just say no” to this eye candy for testosterone sodden boys.
Oh come on. “…some serious stuff on its mind.” Really? Like what — making money? Bob, this is exploitive garbage — nothing more, nothing less.
Bob, To be fair. I could be wrong and I sincerely do appreciate your insightful reviews, which I believe are on-the-mark 99 times out of 100.
Bob, to be fair. I could be wrong, but after seeing the tailer for this film, my inclination finds ne agreeing with A J Daw on this one. That said, I sincerely appreciate your insightful reviews and believe that they’re on-the-mark 99 times out of 100. That’s why I check them out before going to see a film. Keep up the great work.
A friend of mine just said that NPR reviewed this movie as being “not at all what it the title makes it sound like or what you think it will be,” and as “one of THE movies to see this year.” Did anyone else hear that or is she confusing the title with another? Has NPR lost its mind and credibility? Or IS the Apocalypse REALLY now??? She wouldn’t listen to me or wait for me to look up (other) reviews, and didn’t want to miss the show time, so is on her way there now…and has no cell phone. I cringe to think how PO’d she’ll be…this is SO not her kind of movie!