Spring Breakers review - A break beyond mending

Harmony Korine, who cut his teeth on the very independently spirited likes of Kids and Gummo, returns with the Disney-defiling Spring Breakers. It’s the tale of four young women who decide to cut loose on spring break and take the depraved holiday to new extremes. To set out ones stand early on, Spring Breakers is a turgid mess of a film. On a base level the film is a dirty slate of glaring errors. Korine’s script is an utter shambles only further crucified by dire delivery from the unredemptive female leads. Spring Breakers' lens is that of a pervert making the film a leering exercise in salaciousness that reduces any viewer of decent sensibilities to feeling foul and sullied.

How could that not be a good film?

For a film so throbbing with musical beats, neon colouring and near all that’s considered morally depraved under the sun, it’s criminally boring. Coming in at just over an hour and a half it feels drawn out to well over two thanks to flights of existential fancy in which one of the four hateable youths will repeat the same portentous, badly written lines over and over indefinitely. Korine’s attempt at pastiche is so poorly executed it only further exemplifies the ludicrous pretentions of his venture. There is one singular merit in Spring Breakers and it comes in the form of an utterly brilliant James Franco. Working miracles with the abhorrent script his slimy, cornrowed and grilled gangster rapper, Alien, is a wonderfully vile piece of characterisation but he never transcends being just a great character. His role in the film, like everything else, is ultimately unsubstantial and does nothing to save Spring Breakers from being the burning heap of a misguided project that it is.      

Spring Breakers worst mistake is to believe it’s holding a mirror up to the likes of modern chauvinist trash such as Project X or The Hangover films whereas it is in fact holding up a frame. A frame, which through we see the same trite, misogynist filmmaking that we’ve come to hate and condemn. Pervy, ignorant, filmmaking is one thing. Pretentious pervy, ignorant filmmaking is something else entirely and something even harder to stomach.