SPRING BREAKERS (94 minutes) (R18)
Directed by Harmony Korine
Starring Selena Gomez, Vanessa Hudgens, Ashley Benson, James Franco
I’m not sure what it was based on, but I had high hopes for Spring Breakers.
I think I thought, James Franco knows what he’s doing, those Disney girls finally have a chance to prove their acting chops, it looks a bit experimental and indie, I’ll give it a go.
Big mistake.
I’m not going to sugar coat it. This is legitimately the worst movie I’ve ever seen. In my entire life.
And I’ve watched a tonne of rubbish.
But every single one of those terrible movies at least had one redeeming quality about them.
This one might have, except they made fun of it, played it down and made it out to be the bad guy, then they put it on a bus and shipped it off for the rest of the movie.
That redeeming quality was Selena Gomez.
Instead, we were left with an unremarkable Ashley Benson and that one girl whose primary role in the movie was to get wasted, naked and on the next bus.
And of course, Vanessa Hudgens, who, instead of stepping up as an actress and stepping out of the Disney limelight gracefully, only succeeded in reinforcing the thought that she might not be much more than a pretty voice, a pretty face and a pretty girl who’s not afraid to take her clothes off on screen.
Maybe that’s a little harsh.
But I’ve never seen three of today’s biggest role models, so eager to take part in a film that sexualises women to the point where, it felt like the film crew were just dodgy old men who had been given a camera at a high school party and were capturing things they weren’t supposed to.
It felt voyeuristic. At best, it came off as a ridiculously long rap video from the early 2000s.
Add to that, the fact that the plot was almost as senseless as Franco’s character, Alien, and any attempts at character development were as poorly placed through the girls’ phone calls home as a last ditch attempt at humour was through Franco repeating “look at all my stuff” and “spring break forever”.
The soundtrack was terrible, the constant looping of dialogue, the ridiculous Britney Spears sing-alongs, and cliched hipster filming techniques which smacked of pretentious experimentalism so deliberate you could picture it wearing a plaid shirt, loafers, and horn rimmed glasses, curling it’s moustache over a cup of chamomile.
And if nothing else, I think it’s ridiculous to aim this movie at teenagers when all it does is glamourise, binge drinking, drugs, violence, dropping out, stealing, promiscuity, and girls doing what they’re told so they don’t look “frigid” and get put on the bus home.
Basically, all the things we don’t our kids doing, and blame movies for when they do.
