Review #791: 'Spring Breakers' (2012)

Anyone unfamiliar with the unconventional work of former film-making brat Harmony Korine may mistake some early scenes of Spring Breakers - seemingly his first venture into 'mainstream' directing - for the youth and skin-worshipping work of MTV, or even a pop video. The camera pans across and lingers on an endless array of bikini-clad, big-breasted babes, toned, air-punching jocks, and all kinds of behaviour you wouldn't want to see your adolescent child participating in. But there's something vacant and lifeless in their expressions, and the film captures them with a mundaneness despite the thumping beats and gorgeous cinematography. It would seem Harmony Korine doesn't like the youth of today one bit.

He voiced his distaste (or at least wrote it) with his screenplay for Larry Clark's Kids (1995), as it's various characters spread HIV throughout the youth of New York and generally waste their days smoking pot, drinking alcohol, skating in the park, and committing petty crime, all with a disturbing lack of responsibility. Spring Breakers is less realistic and less confrontational, but taps into a youth culture more people can recognise and even relate to. The film often feels like a banal Facebook status brought to life for 90 minutes. And this can often be as tedious as it sounds. Our young and gorgeous heroes spout bull-shit teenage poetry and do hand-stands in corridors and car parks, and these scenes often repeat themselves to nauseous effect.

The film follows four college girls - Faith (Selena Gomez), Candy (Vanessa Hudgens), Brit (Ashley Benson), and Cotty (Rachel Korine - Harmony's wife) - on their spring break. They're short of cash, so they rob a diner armed with water pistols and a hammer, and set off to St. Petersburg, Florida to indulge in sun, sex and alcohol. All is going well until they are busted and thrown in jail for taking cocaine while partying with some older, less-friendly types. Unable to pay their bail, the girls find themselves facing spending their spring break behind bars, and missing out on the life-changing event they have been so looking forward to. Things look up, however, when a rapper named Alien (James Franco) bails them out.

He seems to be in everything these days, popping up in soap operas, TV shows and movies alike as well as finding time to dabble in poetry, short stories and directing. It would be easy to be sick of the sight of James Franco, but his appearance in Spring Breakers takes the film out of the realms of the dreary into something all the more invigorating. It may even take you a while to recognise him, with his cornrows, gold teeth, tattoo's and gangster swagger. He makes Alien, for all his cartoonish behaviour, scarily believable. He brags to the awe-struck girls, "look at my shit!", while he shows them his collection of guns, tanning oil, shorts, and piles of money. Two of the girls lap it up - the other two are wise enough to bail - and are more than willing to participate in his gang activities.

Sadly, Franco's best efforts aren't enough to rescue Spring Breakers from humdrum. While the film intermittently comes to life, scenes drag and linger while monotonous narration plays over the soundtrack and the camera ogles breasts and crotches. There's certainly a message here, and Korine's viewpoint is crystal clear, but perhaps it's too clever for it's own good, becoming just as dreary as the world it is satirising. It will be certainly interesting to see where Korine goes from here, and hopefully his shift into more conventional film-making doesn't mean the peculiar quirks and off-the-wall tone that made Gummo (1997) so utterly brilliant is gone forever.


Directed by: Harmony Korine
Starring: Vanessa Hudgens, Ashley Benson, Selena Gomez, Rachel Korine, James Franco
Country: USA

Rating: ***

Tom Gillespie