Spring Breakers is essentially a love letter to being a slutty, immature, spoilt, uncaring and violent teenage girl. It follows 3 such girls, who try hard to corrupt a fourth, on a spiralling journey into chaos and madness. All the while dressed in bikini's and showing off how the Spring Breaker generation party when they get out of school. There is plenty of drugs, sex and violence and an overbearingly obvious attempt to convey something of the shallowness or crudeness or evilness or something of this act that many a teenager does but unfortunately the movie fails to really make a point about anything.
I find the teenage years a really interesting time of life to focus on in a movie, as do countless coming of age stories, but this film really isn’t a coming of age story. I also find it really interesting to watch beautiful women in bikini's but this film somehow makes that seem dull too. I find it really interesting to see the consequences of making bad decisions and hanging out with the wrong people but in this film there are no consequences for the girls, they get away with anything. And, I find it really interesting to see what happens when you bring in a dangerous fifth person to a small and tight group of friends, but this film fails to portray the consequences and takes the easy path out with just sending half of them home, never to be seen of again for the rest of the movie. How the movie can try and fail on so many levels is kind of interesting.
Ultimately the movie just isn’t that great. It has a kind of excellent premise in that it’s about four hot girls going to spring break, wearing bikinis for the whole movie, getting caught up with a drug dealer, stealing money and partying their arses off, but it tries to convey all of these other ideas along the way and turns into a mess. It should have either just accepted itself as a bit of TnA flick or lessened the TnA and stuck to a specific point. Instead it turned out to be half/half.
The one saving grace of the film and the reason I am recommending everyone should still check it out has nothing to do with what I just said, it’s James Franco. 'Alien' as his character is called in this film is mesmerising. I honestly would not have even known it was James Franco without seeing his name in the credits. He COMPLETELY transforms himself into someone else, and by doing so embodies the American Dream. In one scene he is standing on a bed repeatedly saying 'Look at all my shit!' whilst pointing to his guns, his money, his clothes and his drugs. Its done amazingly well and really sticks out. Actually, almost every scene he is in is memorable so check it out for his acting alone.
SCORE: 6/10
How you can make a movie about spring break, with 4 gorgeous girls wearing next to nothing the whole movie, with James Franco playing a gangster with killer grillz, with regular boobage, drugs, violence, incredibly damn boring I don't know. It trys to be a deep thinking, arthouse curio to show that there is a negative side to the Real Cancoon, and it fails.
ReplyDeleteFull effort for trying, but its just a boring movie. Outstanding score by Skrillex. But everything else is ordinary. Don't like the way its shot, hate that nearly every scene is shot with an orange/red filter, the dialogue is non existant and the storyline just, plain, boring.
I'm giving it 3/10 solely for Franco's performance.