Movie Review: Spring Breakers (Careful now, Spoilers!)

Spring Breakers Poster

Writer and Director: Harmony Korine

Starring: James Franco, Selena Gomez, Ashley Benson, Vanessa Hudgens, Rachel Korine, and Gucci Mane

Cinematography by: Benoît Debie

Editing by: Douglas Crise

Spring Break is kicking around in its death throes, and what a sad thing that is. I know I’ve certainly procrastinated, and for the good health of anybody, I hope you all did too! I also know that I’m not the only one who looked forward to and saw the new movie Spring Breakers. Now, if my opinion is worth 800 words (and who’s isn’t) then maybe I can save someone $10 and 94 minutes. This review has spoilers, you’ve been warned!

Walking out of Harmony Korine’s newest and most prodigal Spring Breakers, I wasn’t sure if my senses were kaput, or if what I’d seen was too garish to sense at all. The film prides itself on Korine’s exactness and style, but as a foremost provocateur, his cinematic patchwork never realizes the ambition of his ideas. It’s true that the film reaches for something and for that it deserves a little credit, but Korine’s vision is almost as unwatchable is it is hard to swallow (and unfortunately there’s none of that either).

I’ll get some good things out of the way first. James Franco’s turn as Alien is mostly brilliant, despite his “y’all” and “bitches” or both every few seconds. The material is tired, but at least Franco isn’t. With a little panache and a lot more exuberance, Alien becomes halfway entertaining to watch, particularly with his lips wrapped around Ashley Benson’s gun barrel. The sexual ideation is edgy in the right way, but delivers unto its women an agency through barbaric violence and sends them packing when the violence bites back. This happens twice. But... oh right, we’re still discussing the good things. Admittedly, there was a scene that I felt genuinely affected by, one that happens (surprisingly) amongst the girls alone. While recounting the restaurant robbery, the three do-wrongs detail their viscousness to a blank-face Selena Gomez, who can’t stop talking about how cleansing the trip is. Scenes like this put Korine’s social commentary front and center, but it’s far too on the nose; it doesn’t help that I can’t possibly buy into its id-like world anyhow. The strongest links on this cynical chain don’t classify as art, but they sure do neutralize the camp in ways that could be considered an insulting attempt at feminism.

Women be damned, though! This is a movie about retribution, horrible, bloody retribution! Evil drug dealers like Gucci Mane (in a raspberry-bound performance) are Korine’s lame excuse for a plot that already feels robotic. Maybe it’s just another stroke of gifted casting, since his ice cream cone tattoo makes his eventual murder more sanctifying to the girls that do it. I half expected them to start licking the thing off his dead face. Regrettably, Mane has the chance to spit out some really grating lines before he goes, but at least he has the good sense to get almost as naked as his bisexual hookers. 

The 'Spring Breakers' themselves

The two characters we’re left with by the end are passionately unlikable, and during the raid on Mane’s druggy compound, are entirely un-killable. Bullets fly, but like any action movie with foreign baddies, the heroes dodge attack. It could just be a dream, like Franco says so many times (which makes sense because what line in this movie isn’t repeated until vacuous), but then it’s all a cop-out. I guess I wouldn’t expect less. When everything is a fantasy, but the fantasy is laughable, then every word, every neon-sunset tinted image is misused in service of a terribly misanthropic dystopia. Korine penetrates a hyperbolic issue that might as well not exist. I know I wasn’t the only one laughing when Britney Spears started playing, or when everything started making no sense. The atmosphere is a well-designed empty space and that is not what makes an engaging movie. It’s tedious, and worse, it’s tantalizing; there is a good movie that could have been.

There’s no potential like wasted potential, and that’s Korine’s colossal failure. When I hear “youth is wasted on the young,” I don’t want to think about Spring Breakers, because if any movie has ever embodied carpe diem so recklessly, this is it. Not so much in its defense, but in mine, I’ll repeat that the film critiques its own predicament. At the same time, though, it has the audacity to name a religious character “Faith” and give Skrillex an original soundtrack credit. But hey, at least its quotable. Spring break forever, bitches!

Maybe you still want to see it and I can’t blame you if that’s the case (I appear to be in the slight minority), check out the trailer below: