Four college girls who land in jail after robbing a restaurant in order to fund their spring break vacation find themselves bailed out by a drug and arms dealer who wants them to do some dirty work.
Incoherent, brash and self-consciously 'arthouse' in execution, Harmony Korine's Spring Breakers is an intriguing cinematic spectacle: an awful film that seems aware – nay, aggressively boastful – of its own awfulness.
A trashy, neon-bathed orgy of fake boobs, arthouse style and impromptu Britney Spears covers, Spring Breakers is no ordinary film. While there’s nothing inherently wrong with Korine’s experimental approach, it results in a repetitive affair which grows tiresome quickly.
Spring Breakers toys with our voyeurism and the dark side of teen hedonism but comes up empty. Arguably that’s intentional – a film as insubstantial as its characters – but where’s the provocation in a long, slow build-up to nothing in particular? Korine’s movies have no answers or solutions. They just push buttons.
A lurid, luminous teen-bender movie, as ludicrous as it is stylish, and Harmony Korine’s best film in years.
If Michael Mann was to take a lot of hallucinogenics and shoot a Girls Gone Wild video, it might look something like this.
A tedious attempt to inject some style and artistic flair into the teen movie, combing outrageous behaviour with arty, slo-mo cinematography and a monotonous voiceover.
Korine has created a hit that exposes the lack of ambition in mainstream cinema almost as clearly as he exposes the flesh of his young protagonists.
Spring break 4eva!
It is a powerful evocation of what it must be like to be young, white, beautiful and stupid; among friends, on drugs, on holiday; living in the moment and without a thought for tomorrow. It feels at least as exhilarating as it does worrying and wrong.
Like Baywatch mating with Scarface. So... Bayface? Not to be high-minded about it, but that's much less fun than it sounds.
Is the film’s cynicism what a corrupted popular culture deserves, or something more contemptible, that of a fortysomething director lingering over the torsos of Disney starlets in the hope of clearing his mortgage repayments?
Looks pretty, but has a wildly anxious structure.
It is an entirely pagan entertainment.
Spring Breakers is as close to Bret Easton Ellis and Roy Lichtenstein as it is to Russ Meyer. It is truly conceptual trash cinema – the beer-and-tits movie as pop-art object.
It resembles a psychedelic distaff Florida take on the climax of Scorsese's Taxi Driver. Korine would feel he'd failed badly were I to have enjoyed it.
Drink, drugs, and the hyper-sexual: the dark heart of 'spring break'
Spring Breakers isn't just a terrible movie, it reinforces rape culture
Harmony Korine: How I (accidentally) reinvented the party movie
Harmony Korine on Spring Breakers: "I'm a soldier of cinema"
General release. Check local listings for show times.
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