James Franco, practically unrecognizable as a drug-dealing hoodlum/rapper, provides a saving grace of sorts to the largely limp Spring Breakers. With Franco onscreen the film’s stylistic excesses are obscured to an extent. Director Harmony Korine seems to be acting on an impulse to give the spring break genre a heightened grindhouse intensity of casual sex and lurid violence while simultaneously holding this particular corner of the American dream up to serious scrutiny. It’s a shame he undermines both the cheap thrills and the moral lessons with an artsy-fartsy veneer on things.
The drive-by shootings and orgies too often flow through a filter of introspective filmmaking as pretentious as it is repetitive. Although the dubstep soundtrack is mostly effective, it’s offset by visuals that revel in the overdone. Voiceovers often duplicate verbatim the same dialogue two or three extra times while the film’s characters mostly stare into space. These ginned-up techniques soon begin to seem like trappings meant to stretch the film to ninety minutes. The dramatic tension of crazed chicks getting bailed out of jail by Franco and falling under his spell, while well done, runs adrift when we’re constantly interrupted by the meandering interludes. Any potential dramatic momentum gives way to impressionistic twaddle, then eventually wavers to the most improbable of endings.
Yet, don’t refrain from seeing this film. Franco’s character, Alien (he pronounces it A-Lean) will stick with you. He’s outrageous, compelling and looks and speaks truly devil-may-care. When he takes a shining to the straight-arrow in the bunch, Faith (Helena Gomez), we almost don’t see him as exploitive. He’s fearless and scary at the same time, and equally charismatic and vain. He portrays an exaggerated bloating of a stereotype: “Look at my shit” he gleefully tells the gals as they all swim in a big bed filled with a huge arsenal of guns and hundred dollar bills that spew over onto the floor. The toll for this loot proves too much for Faith and one of the other girls (played by Korine’s wife, Rachel) but the remaining two stick around for the final shenanigans. From terrorizing a restaurant’s patron’s with squirt guns in an earlier scene, we know they’ve got the moxie to force some cash to finance their spring break trip. Then they meet Alien and the craziness just begins.
3 Disney Girls Gone Wild In An Unlikely Art Flick With An Uncanny James Franco (out of 5)