|
www.kevacho.com
©2002-2024
Kevin Michael Vance
Writer - Portland, Oregon
|
|
|
Go Back To Reviews
Title: SPRING BREAKERS
Director: Harmony Korine
Year: 2012
Reviewed: July 25, 2013
| Rating: |
|
 | |
| |
 | |
| |
Birthday Cake-Second Highest Rating |
[Rating Definitions]
|
|
|
Spring Breakers is a beautifully shot movie that borrows strongly from Michael Mann and eighties music videos and fails miserably on every level concerning story. There was some potential for this film. It could have been a movie about going up the river into madness and the loss of innocence, however, the film intentionally goes nowhere, in the more recent style of Gus Van Sant, and therefore receives nothing but a BIRTHDAY CAKE review. It does not have the visceral impact of "Kids", which the director co-wrote, nor does it have the slow, disturbing quality of "Gummo", which he directed. "Spring Breakers" was a movie that barely scratched the surface only to make me go, "meh... that's it?" It was as if Soffia Coppola directed "Kids".
The story of "Spring Breakers" is simple enough- four bimbo's steal money to go to spring break and fall into the seductive clutches of drug-dealer "A-lean", played extremely well by James Franco. However, there is zero character development, and not to mention the only character with a story worth watching, Selena Gomez's character, leaves halfway through the film; almost as if she knew it wasn't going anywhere thematically... and bailed. Gomez's character was a Jesus-freak Christian who was happy when the three, blond, bimbos robbed people so they could get to spring break in Florida, but got freaked out when they went to jail and James Franco bailed them out and took them to a party with a couple of weird looking twins, and a bunch of black men. So she left. Because she was uncomfortable. Really? REALLY? No drama. No tension. The other one, the biggest sexpot in the trio of blond bimbos, left because she got shot in the arm. Which is certainly a better reason to leave than being scared, but still about as boring as Gus Van Sant filming a school shooting. Not to mention, these are inexplicable story devices that do not move the story forward, but rather makes it come to a screeching halt. So, for half the movie your left with the two, dumb bimbos who you, as a viewer, don't give a rats-ass about, and who somehow take down a drug kings lair by themselves, wearing pink bikinis. Meh!
There were a couple of moments when the movie really could have gone somewhere, and done something, but the director decided to do nothing with these moments. At one point the two bimbos (you know, the ones we loathe) threaten to steal from James Franco's character at gun point. Both my friend and I were like... "all right, here we go". But Franco's character proceeds to deep throat two silenced automatic pistols, and the scene goes absolutely nowhere. Then there was the scene of the party where Gomez simply cries and leaves. Korine could have done something with the third Bimbo getting shot, but he didn't, and you're reminded that the only character with any depth, of any kind, left the movie twenty minutes ago.
Meh. Don't see "Spring Breakers". It's Gus Van Sant done with an eighties Michael Mann flare.
|
|
