SPRING BREAKERS Review

SPRING BREAKERS Review

By Darin Skaggs

     “Spring break. Spring break. Spring break.”  These words are whispered throughout Harmony Korine’s new film Spring Breakers by James Franco’s character Alien.  All the characters take Spring Break to get away from their terrible lives and throw all cares out the window.

     The film is about four girls who are stranded at their college campus for spring break due to the fact they did not raise enough money.  After a while they get so bored and depressed about not getting to go to the beach they devise a plan to get money.  Their plan is to rob a diner.  They do and then take their riches and head off to spring break.

     The opening scene and all the other spring break scenes are filmed as what you hear happens on spring break just amped up 100 times more.  The scenes contain alcohol consumption, nudity and tons of drugs.  The scenes however are not a celebration of these acts.  The scenes are so uncomfortable and hard to watch that the filmmaker is trying to say how bad these acts are and how dumb these kids are being.  He spends the rest of the film telling us why these people are drawn to it.

     The girls, our protagonists, spend the first half hour being sad, bored and whinny about the fact that they could not go get away from their lives.  They come to the point of boredom to where they will do anything to getaway.  That includes robbing and being violent.  That is what the film is about, how being bored can be the most dangerous for the young.  Later during the film the girls are put into jail for doing drugs and under aged drinking.  They are later bailed out by Alien, a great James Franco performance.  He saves them and takes them in as his own.   This character spends his life like it is spring break saying that he does not care and wants to just be a bad person.  He does not care that all his siblings were killed while living like he is.

     There are two sequences in the film where the characters sing Brittney Spears songs because the themes are pointed to her.  She is a person who has done things it seems just out of boredom.  Like when she shaved her head, got married for a day and getting drunk several times.  These people look up to this kind of behavior and have the mindset “monkey see, monkey do.”  By the end of the film the filmmaker challenges how “evil” can a bored person get and how far can some people go before realizing their not acting right.