If you make shit intentionally, and you call it art, is it still shit? This is the question that director Harmony Korine asks with Spring Breakers, and unfortunately, the answer is yes. Challenging Only God Forgives for the best cinematography yet worst script of the year, this rote heap of manure is uninspired, unoriginal, and completely offensive to good taste and everything it stands for. To call this bikini-clad onslaught of decadence, filth, and disgusting imagery a movie in any sense of the word is an enormous insult to actual cinema. This thing, whatever it is, is clearly not a movie, as it lacks characters, a plot, a coherent story, and dialogue that a potty-mouthed second-grader couldn’t have written. It’s the anus of cinema.
Spring Breakers is the story of, and I shall put this bluntly, four dumb sluts who rob a redneck fast-food joint in order to pay for their retarded spring break. They then proceed to drive down to Florida for the three Bs of spring break: Bongs, beaches, and boobies. For those of you expecting some sort of scathing social commentary from the infamously subversive director of this atrocity, look elsewhere. It is nowhere near as deep or as blunt as it should be, and it ends up getting too enthralled with showing the audience the disgusting side of youth in America, while simultaneously forgetting to actually satirize it. The result is an enormous, pointless, and borderline unwatchable mess that qualifies as one of the worst movies of the year.
Spring Breakers stars Selena “Getaway Bitch” Gomez, Vanessa Hudgens, Rachel Korine, and Ashley Benson as the four constantly bikini-clad main characters, and co-stars James Franco as a rapper by the name of Alien who takes them under his wing. Franco has been praised for his performance in this film, and I can see why, as he clearly gives it his all. But he’s playing such a one-dimensional character (“LOOK AT ALL MY SHIT!”), it’s impossible to give a fuck about him, no matter how invested he is in the role. Meanwhile, the four girls are virtually interchangeable, each having the occasional breakdown but always getting better just in time for a little more insanity.
The begrudging exception is Gomez as Faith, who acts as the highly religious moral center of the film. She’s still a dumb slut, but it’s really not that hard to be the moral center of a movie with characters this detestable and one-dimensional. I was waiting for her to somehow guide the movie to a close, or at least provide a mildly relatable character for the audience to take an interest in, but no-- she went home halfway through the movie. And the audience is then left with nothing but James Franco and three idiots jackassing around Florida and shooting shit up.
The sole saving grace of this film is the cinematography, which blends mind-bending slow motion with technicolor neon lights to create an incredibly weird effect. Supposedly, the film was supposed to resemble an acid trip, and the director definitely succeeded on that front. But even when the camerawork is magnificent, which it often is, it’s still filming repetitive shit. Yes, Harmony Korine, we get it-- you like boobs. But showing them to us for ninety minutes isn’t really a movie. It’s softcore porn.
The dialogue, when it even shows up, is some of the worst ever written. “Spring break... spring break forever...” I don’t know who the sadist is who had James Franco say that line eight hundred times over the course of this shitfest, but he deserves a special place in hell. For ninety minutes that feel like ninety hours, this movie plods along contributing nothing to society, much like the knuckledraggers who made it. The damage this kind of movie wreaks on people’s minds is unforgivable. I’d say that it was a career-killer, but to be honest, none of the people in this thing really had a career to begin with. And rightly so.
Final Score for Spring Breakers: 2/10 stars. Even though it features an inexplicably committed performance by James Franco, this painful mess is impossible to recommend on any level to anyone. It’s not only bad, it’s aggressively bad-- so bad, in fact, that it makes the audience feel as though they’re missing some biting piece of social commentary that, if noticed, will make Spring Breakers instantly enjoyable. But that aspect of this film does not exist, and if it does, it will elude any viewer who hasn’t taken a bong rip in the past half-hour. It’s the anus of cinema.
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