Spring Breakers

The biggest problem with Spring Breakers isn't its redundant nature, or even the utter pointlessness of the entire thing, but rather, the fact that it tries too hard. Some movies are shocking, plain and simple. Other movies try too hard to be shocking and just come off as ridiculous or silly. Unfortunately, I think Spring Breakers falls into the latter category.

The film stars a slew of former goodie-two-shoes actresses trying to be taken more seriously as grown ups. Selena Gomez (of Wizards of Waverly Place and dating Justin Bieber fame) is the one who stays truest to her good girl image. She plays Faith, a Christian good girl who basically just wants to have a good time and prance around in her little bikini. There's nothing really wrong with that. Her friends try to be a bad influence on her. Vanessa Hudgens (High School Musical), Ashley Benson (Pretty Little Liars) and Rachel Korine (the director, Harmony Korine's wife) are the ones who try the hardest to break their images. They start the film out by robbing a restaurant at (fake) gun point in order to get money for Spring Break and end the film with Benson and Hudgens having a threeway with a white rapper named Alien (a movie stealing James Franco) before engaging in a pretty crazy shoot out. In between all of this, they smoke weed, do coke, drink tons of beer, and get arrested - all while wearing various bikini's. As far as trashy entertainment goes, the premise of Spring Breakers is fine. But there are other problems.

First of all, the movie is so redundant that it is sort of infuriating. It's like Harmony Korine (who also wrote the brilliant Kids) wrote three pages of dialogue for the movie and then just had his actors repeat the same things over and over. It starts off as a sort of neat ploy - hearing the conversation with a voice over random scenes of debauchery and then seeing the way the convo really plays out - but it gets exhausting after a while. Secondly, the whole movie is sort of pointless. Yes, it's fun. Yes, it's trashy. Yes, there are tons of naked chicks in it. But the movie has very little plot development until the last twenty minutes or so. I have two final problems with the film, that sort of go hand in hand. The first is that the movie tries to hard to be shocking when it's really not. And the second is the fact that these actresses are trying very hard to be gritty and dangerous and adult, but they fall very short of their goal.

As I mentioned earlier, Korine also wrote Kids. Kids is a movie that is genuinely shocking. If you haven't seen it, it's the story of a bunch of 12 year olds who are running around New York City doing drugs and spreading AIDS to one another. It's a devastating movie that feels raw and real, maybe because it starred a bunch of unknown actors which just added to the elevated height of realism. Maybe because Korine wrote a great script and director Larry Clark nailed the gritty realism. Spring Breakers wants to be that kind of movie, but it just seems so fake. It's definitely guilty of trying to hard. It wants to be sexy and shocking, but it fails miserably. That could be because of the leading ladies. They are all trying so hard to break free of their good girl images, but they are only sort of trying. They are okay with pretending to smoke weed and frolick around in bikinis, but nudity? Forget it. They leave that to Rachel Korine and an endless amount of extras. So the entire movie just feels like one big experiment in pretending. It just doesn't feel honest.

Of course, it's not without its good points, mainly James Franco and his hilarious and over the top white rapper, who loves guns, girls, cars and playing Britney Spears on the piano. Franco is truly a joy to watch as he delves deeper and deeper into this new found career he has of doing the most bizarre things he can think of or find.

It seems like I'm the only one who didn't enjoy Spring Breakers, however. It's getting rave reviews. I guess I can see a sort of trashy joy in watching three hot girls in bikinis and ski masks dance around with machine guns while Franco plays and sings Spears on the piano. It is sort of fun in a ridiculous way. It's not like I was expecting Spring Breakers to be some sort of revolutionary experience or anything. I was just hoping to find a bit more (or any) depth.

Grade: D+