Review: ‘Spring Breakers’

Hey, do you like to oogle scantily clad young flesh whilst listening to Skrillex, all wrapped up in the confines of an arty indie movie trying to say something but in the end not really saying all that much at all but still looking cool doing it? Then buddy, do we have the perfect movie for you.

“Spring Breakers” is the story of four small town college girls who raise the funds to make it to Spring Break week in St. Petersburg, Florida (because everyone all over the world knows that the one place anyone associates spring break with is St. Pete, Florida), and once they get there, set out to be as debaucherous and wild as they possibly can, which means pretty much scene after scene of half naked and fully naked people drinking from beer funnels and jumping around in slow motion with their hands in the air and watching girls make out with each other and trashing their environment with reckless abandon, just moving around from setting to setting like beaches and hotel rooms and pools.

Much of the appeal and “shock factor” of this movie, which prominently features supposedly good girls doing definitively bad things, stems from the casting of three actresses best known for more mainstream, much safer work. Ashley Benson (Days of Our Lives, Pretty Little Liars) and Vanessa Hudgens (High School Musical, Sucker Punch) are the two instigators in this group of friends, the ones who come up with the brightest ideas, like robbing people for their spring break money and happily tagging along with an insane wanna-be gangster and drug dealer who calls himself Alien (James Franco, Oz the Great and Powerful).

And then there is Selena Gomez (Barney & Friends, Wizards of Waverly Place), who plays the one character with some actual depth and texture, the friend in the group who tries to balance her desires to be free and go buck wild like her friends with her religious upbringing and her innate desire to just want to be a good person (a desire her friends so not seem to share). There’s also a fourth friend, played by wife of the director, and her character really doesn’t get any development at all, completely lost in the shuffle amongst the other three.

So really what is this movie trying to say? Because at first writer/director Harmony Korine revels in the outlandish Girls Gone Wild vibe of spring break, letting his camera comfortably gaze over dozens of young girls freely debasing themselves in front of dozens of guys, hundreds when it is all said and done really, and the bare breasts are a flying and the girls are all booty popping and it is just a mess as these kids just lose their souls for a week straight. This is what the four girls want so desperately to get to, and when they do they embrace it and proclaim it to be a life changing, soul enhancing experience, and we’re supposed to take them seriously. Especially since it is the one girl in the bunch who actually cares about the spiritual side of life (and who is hysterically named Faith because “Hello I am a Christian” would have been too obvious a character name for her), and she tells her grandmother on the phone that she feels so great there and it’s good for her soul, and then cut to girls being doused in booze and passing out naked in front of amoral, meathead boys.

But then halfway through the movie, just as Faith as her crisis of her namesake, she just gets on a bus and leaves town and the movie and that’s it for her! Let’s bring her dramatic arc to a climax and then put her on a bus right out of the story. That makes perfect sense. The movie then turns into something a little different, as drug dealer Alien gets into a 3-way relationship with the two blond instigators who appear to be quite soulless themselves, while Rachel Korine’s character literally sleeps in a couple of scenes, and then makes a grand, bloody exit, and why not ditch her because her character was truly pointless.

The last half of the movie is then Alien and his two lady friends and how he has a turf war with former best friend and current sworn enemy Archie, played by rapper Gucci Mane (and this is not even the weirdest casting choice in the film, as Affliction-style t-shirt wearing professional wrestler Jeff Jarrett played an Affliction-style t-shirt wearing youth pastor in a couple of early scenes). This second half of the movie is totally different, it’s all girls with guns, being bad, hanging out, and by the time they start reaching for some deeper meaning and profundity at the end, it all gets lost in a stereotypical blaze of Hollywood-style gunfire. It’s a little frustrating to see such a wonderfully weird and cleverly staged indie movie devolve into something a little derivative of all the movies already made at an alarming clip.

It is a mostly fun movie, featuring an off the wall Franco performance that is quite fun, and Korine really is a pretty good director and a very interesting filmmaker. He has always eschewed the normal styles of storytelling and frankly the normal stories that people hear all the time, and he has managed to traffic successfully in these kind of culture shock movies, whether he’s getting deep into the weird lives of hillbilly rednecks, New York City street kids, or spring breakers, he manages to find the uglier and meaner sides of these cultures and puts them on display and proclaims them to be normal and maybe they are. They are normal to the inhabitants of that culture anyway. Weird to us maybe, but normal to them. This is life. Sometimes it gets ugly, and you gotta dress it up with a pink ski mask and some black lights.