Inspired by actual events, a group of fame-obsessed teenagers use the internet to track celebrities' whereabouts in order to rob their homes.
It is an enjoyable, amusing and well-executed film even if it does feel awfully insubstantial and inconsequential.
Want to know why middle-class kids commit larceny for Louboutins? This film isn’t so interested. The answer is probably rooted in greed and envy, but, you know: whatever.
Coppola [uses] the true story to render an insightful portrait of today’s youth (making it an interesting, less surreal companion piece to Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers), perfectly encapsulating the way celebrities are currently celebrated and consumed.
Girls meets Ocean’s Eleven, The Bling Ring might be a film for right now rather than the ages, but Sofia Coppola’s heist movie is visually arresting, well acted, capricious fun.
Much of the picture is spent simply marking time - with repeat raids - until they inevitably get caught. At this point there’s a half-hearted effort at some social commentary as we see the characters caught up in their own celebrity circus but it’s ultimately meaningless, like the guff that comes out of their mouths.
An intriguingly intuitive and atmospheric film.
It’s really Coppola’s increasing limitations as a film-maker that are most evident here. After examining fame’s bubble-like existence in the wondrous Lost in Translation, the interesting Marie Antoinette and the vapid Somewhere, The Bling Ring sees her going round in ever decreasing circles.
Yet it's impossible not to think that this story might have been better served either by documentary or by a director who has experienced the view peering in as well as looking out. Sometimes the knock-off can feel less phoney than the original.
The story itself loses any focus and we end as we began, bored and wondering, that this surely couldn’t be it?
Sofia Coppola on The Bling Ring: 'What these kids did really took ingenuity'
General release. Check local listings for show times.
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