Spring Breakers Review
I had dabbled over watching Spring Breakers for a while. On one hand; a film about four drunken college girls who go “soul searching” on Spring Break appealed to me as much as a mouldy biscuit. On the other hand; James Franco knocks out a “gangsta” performance and at least two of the girls were Disney alumni’s in an attempt to break out of their image. After much deliberation, I gave in to the other hand and forced my way through the most painful experience I have ever had watching film. I should have listened to the one hand.
If you didn’t get it from the title, the trailer or the poster, Spring Breakers is about four girls; Faith, Candy, Cotty and Brit as they leave their humdrum lives to head to a hedonistic spring break holiday in Florida. Believing to have found themselves, the girls are awash with great spirits, alcohol and sex. Their trip turns sour after a subsequent arrest during a party and the girls are bailed out by Gangster/Rapper Alien who in turn wants to own the girls for his crimes and own pleasure. As each girl leaves, their party is soon narrowed down to two cold hearted girls who want to live the life of crime forever.
Harmony Korine has never been a writer to aim to please the critics and most of his movies such as Kids feature sex, drugs and teenagers. But with Kids, there was a generally feel of changing the shape of cinema and he broke boundaries with the dream like Gummo, aiming to take a new shape to cinema. With Spring Breakers, however, Korine writes like a hyped up teenager himself who admittedly has never been on Spring Break and wanted to homage it. So Spring Breakers turns into the biggest cliché in cinema history.
The girls are all very stunning and very cold. Not once do you feel an ounce of empathy these girls and that makes the viewing worse. You don’t want to follow their journey of self discovery through a cocaine snort because frankly, you don’t care. They are underdeveloped sources of Korine's frustration of never achieving a hedonistic holiday. Mostly blonde, bikini clad and mentally unstable, our four “heroines” are flat and lazily written characters. The safest girl who has a religious background is called “Faith,” for crying out loud. What’s worse is that the two dimensions of these characters make the movie predictable and near garbage. The actresses could be good but with such little in the way of great dialogue and plot, they seem to falter. As their crimes increase and they are forced to level up in situations, each girl leaves having “discovered” themselves during Spring Break. And what they did discover was that they could murder, take drugs, have sex and commit robberies with no definite legal repercussions or guilt. Their prior arrest is for taking a little bit of cocaine. They are the most frustrating leads.
And when James Franco appears as Alien, the whole movie turns on itself and becomes this surreal movie. There has to be some applause to Franco for truly bending his acting backwards to create a character that is highly unbelievable and ridiculous. In one scene, he actually sings Brittney Spears with the girls and a montage of them committing crimes is juxtaposed. I don’t blame him for going all out with this irritating gangster. But Alien is by far the most annoying character in the whole movie from his dialogue that is repeated more than once for some strange reason to his self-entitlement and vanity over his possessions. There is a moment where he brags about the perfume he wears. The moment where Alien arrives, the whole movie should take a dark turn but instead it becomes all rather silly.
Spring Breakers is the reason why painkillers were invented. It is this weird combination of teenager party flicks such as American Pie with art house shots, broken narration and independent flicks. But Korine never achieves the right balance and Spring Breakers becomes this cliché of beautiful people partying by a beach on steroids.
Like Korine, I have never had a Spring Break. Incidentally, if I were to make a film about what I believe to be Spring Break to be then you can bet some of the elements would be the same. Spring Breakers feels like a desperate attempt to be popular and cool while steal holding on to weird elements of film making. I’ve never wanted to walk out of a film so much since Knowing. Not because I was offended or because I didn’t get. I got the whole film from the first five minutes. That’s the issue. And I am honestly confused that this has positive reviews. There seems to be no redeeming quality apart from a lot of nudity. Spring Breakers is sloppy film making that attempts to be serious. It should be buried six foot under the sand and the words “spring break” should never be uttered again.
TTFN
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