“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.
Butler's Cinema Scene 