Spring Breakers *

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One Liner Review:

Absolutely awful, this movie wants to be project x as told like a terrence malick film, only there is barely any story and just about no dialogue either.

Brief Review:

Spring Breakers is a real lousy movie. it’s for the super artistic crowd that likes tree of life and doesn’t care so much about story as long as the images look like paintings. for me, if I want to look at paintings, I’ll got to a museum. If I want to listen to poetry i’ll read a book or listen to music. A movie has to be more than that. It has to have a story, and this one doesn’t. It has the very basic strokes of the outline of a story. Four girls go down to Miami for spring break and get in trouble and get bailed out by a strange guy and start spending time with him. that’s about it. we don’t even see or learn what they got in trouble for. The movie is a mess and it gets worse as it goes on and voice over monologues get repeated as if this is a song. it isn’t. The movie tries to be way too experimental and comes away missing all of the beats it needed to hit just to keep our interest.

REVIEW:

Spring Breakers is a movie that looks like a Michael bay film, but moves and feels like a Terrence malice film. Neither one of those is a good thing. Bay is the guy who makes overblown, colorful yet campy, really dumb movies. The only thing this movie has in common with his films is the look of them, which includes good looking young people of limited intelligence parading around in bikinis and tight outfits. This movie would have actually been better if it was a Michael bay film, because at least then, it would have moved at a decent pace, like pain and gain.
Unfortunately, as far as pace and feel, this one is all Terrence malice. That’s the guy who made tree of life, which is what I consider one of the worst movies of the past decade. Spring breakers are probably right behind it. Malice is a filmmaker who puts nature and scenery ahead of story. His films move at incredibly slow paces and nothing tends to happen in them. Now that’s a generalization, and malice has definitely made good movies like badlands and the thin red line during the course of his career. But more often then not, his movies are lousy, like his film days of heaven, and spring breakers feels like it easily could have been one of them.
The movie is basically a series of shots with little to no connecting story. It’s about four girls who go down to Miami for spring break and get into trouble there, where they are arrested and bailed out by a gangster. So far it sounds like there’s a story, right? Wrong. You see we never find out what it is that the girls got arrested for. It’s almost like getting a still photograph of the girls standing in front of a judge and then another one of them walking out of jail to see the guy who bailed them out. Whatever the story is, it’s basically kept hidden away from us.
Not telling us what the girls got arrested for is the first big mistake of the film. We can gather from what the judge tells them that it’s for partying too hard and using drugs, but it would have been nice to see some of that and to see how it all went down. From the trailers, this movie looked like it could have been a combination of return to paradise and broke down palace. That means it could have and should have been about these innocent yet naive girls who go off to another country or state, and do whatever they want. They think that the laws won’t apply to them, and then they get a rude awakening when it does. Only we don’t get any of that. We don’t even find out what they did that got them into trouble. Whatever potential this movie had is quickly blown as the movie handles everything it had going for it in the worst possible way.
Whatever storyline there actually is happens at the beginning of the film. The girls are all in college and planning to go away for spring break. It is four of them. We meet two of the girls in class as they sit in a dark lecture hall, listening to a boring professor drone on, and drawing pictures of penises. We meet another girl who is the most innocent of the bunch and is participating in religious group sessions. This is faith, played by Selene Gomez. She’s the one of the four girls who doesn’t seem to belong.
The three other girls leave faith behind one night and pull off a robbery. They know faith will never be on board, but they also know that they need money in order to go on spring break. So the girls get into a pickup truck, grab some water guns, and hold up a restaurant. Other than quick flashes, we never really see the scene from the inside of the restaurant. Instead we move past the windows, staying outside, looking in at what is happening. While going inside would have been better, this is still the best scene in the movie. For one thing, it is one of the only scenes that have anything to do with a plot.
The girls have that getting arrested situation, where we don’t see what they were doing before or even while they are arrested, but only see them in bikinis wearing handcuffs and standing in front of a police car. They go to prison and are bailed out by a guy named alien (jams Franco.) alien has a metal grill for teeth and talks like he is from the hood. He has dreadlocks in his hair and thinks he is something much better and cooler than he actually is. Still, the girls admire him for his confidence and get on board with him, despite his strange ways.
While alien seems like an interesting character on the surface, he never actually does anything. The movie gives him no real actions or conversations. That’s because this film wants to be like a poem, saying something without actually doing much of anything. The problem is that it doesn’t say something. It is actually pretty lifeless, which is the last thing a movie like this should have been. Whatever plot there is involves the girl’s start in to leave one at a time. First it’s faith that can’t believe her friends are staying when they need to get back to school. After that, it’s one of the girls who get shot in the arm. Then the other two decide to stay.
There are so many problems with this movie. We know the girls are doing crimes in the second half of the film, but we don’t actually get to see any of them or even hear about what they have done. Instead, scenes are just of them back at the house partying. The most memorable scene is when they hold guns to alien’s head. It seems for a moment like this scene might be interesting and then alien just shrugs it off and we are back to square one again. The main reason why this movie is so lousy is because it might have a vision, but it has no sense of storytelling. It wants to be project x meets kids (by the same writer as kids, harmonies karine, who directed this film), only both of those movies had story. The end of this film has left so far behind the story behind that we are forced to listen to voice-over dialogue monologues with the same phrases being repeated again and again. Phrases like, “spring break forevvvver.” this film is so bad that there is even a threesome scene in a pool that is more uncomfortable and dull than it is hot. Watch alpha dog to see how to do this kind of scene right. Spring breakers are an absolute mess in pretty much every way.

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