Spring Breakers
This is not just a bad film, but a reprehensible one. It gives the phrase “soft porn” a bad name.
Rating: Less than zero!
Spring Breakers is a colossally idiotic film looking for love in all the wrong places. College girls are treated as a group of sex-starved idiots with a propensity for armed robbery if short on cash.
I took my 22-year old Saudi foreign exchange student, Thamer, along to cover my dwindling reputation, and he found the scenes involving spring break activities in Florida to be largely accurate. It’s not hard to grasp how college age students are attracted to an environment overpowered by thousands of drunken colleagues.
But please don’t assume that Spring Breakers is a comic take of college kids on the make. To the contrary, this is a dire film about dull, twisted college women who are looking for excitement regardless of the consequences. In the process, they link up with a wretched underworld drug dealer who provides them with a free ticket to his own version of hell.
The movie is like getting stabbed with a dull knife. Incredibly, many scenes and accompanying dialogue are pathetically repeated. The audience is asked to believe that college girls find group sex, hard drugs and an occasional arrest preferable to the boredom of a college education. There is not a single character in this film that you won’t passionately dislike, and I mean no one.
The film focuses on four college female friends, two of them played by the Disney veterans Selena Gomez and Vanessa Hudgens. The girls spend the entire film in skimpy attire, which proves to be their greatest attribute.
Furthermore, you quickly get an idea of where this movie is heading when the four air-heads pull off an armed robbery of a restaurant near their school in order to obtain the money needed for their spring vacation. As I told Thamer, it is best to avoid these ladies at all times, as who knows when they will stick a gun to your head to rob you if times prove desperate.
But the movie becomes wretchedly morbid with the appearance of James Franco. A white drug dealer/gangsta rapper with a collection of silver teeth, the girls link up with him when he gets them out of jail. Sadly, all but Ms. Gomez find themselves enamored with a guy who resembles one of the characters in George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968).
While the film tries to repeatedly focus on the excesses that occur during spring break, it all becomes meaningless. Franco ends up in a war with some black competitors led by Gucci Mane, and the girls soon become quite accomplished as his adoring hit women.
There are many dull, repulsive things about this convoluted film, most centering on the decision of Director Harmony Korine to paint college girls as little more than born floozies who view college as a complete waste of time. It’s one thing to embrace a spring break trip as a week of frivolity and excess, but quite another to treat it as a door into a murderous, sadistic lifestyle.
Bob, was there a reason why didn’t you attend this movie alone? By the way, thanks for the heads up about this one. I almost considered seeing it.