Directed by Harmony Korine
Starring James Franco, Selina Gomez, Vanessa Hudgens, Ashley Benson, Rachel Korine

Grade: D-

Who needs Reefer Madness when you have Harmony Korine films? His newest movie, Spring Breakers, plays like an R rated Christian propaganda film. Parents, if your kids smoke pot they will turn into murderous psychopaths who fuck older gross gangster men. (Note to parents: If your kid is a stoner psychopath, they’ll still be a psychopath if you sober them up.) Disguised as an edgy and gritty thriller, Breakers is really just an hour and a half long Ned Flanders nightmare. This is the kind of America that my grandparents are convinced exist because the liberals took Jesus out of schools. The screenplay reads like it’s written by someone who’s never done drugs, or met an actual black person, in their entire lives.
The story follows four girls, one who is actually given some semblance of a personality, as they rob a local restaurant in order to fund their spring break trip to Florida. Once on the beach, they party, have sex, do drugs and generally act like assholes. They get busted for doing drugs at a party and James Franco, a drug-dealing rapper who acts like a stereotypical black thug because he grew up as the only white kid in his neighborhood. The girls come stay with him, except for Selina Gomez because she believes in God so she’s the only one with enough sense to get out of that situation. The four girls are down to two. Then one gets shot in the arm by a rival drug dealer and suddenly everything gets a little too real for her and she gets on a bus and goes home too. That leaves the blond one and the other blond one. Their names aren’t important because they’re given no personality, other than that they seem to like drugs and they’ll probably have sex with you if you have some drugs. Asking these two girls to essentially carry this movie is a bad idea because they’re just so horrifically boring and uninteresting people. Finally, the girls go on a murderous rampage, because well, why wouldn’t they?

There are a few laughs in this movie, though almost all of them seem to be unintentional. Franco does get to show off his comedic improvisational skills at times though, particularly in a fairly inspired scene where he’s showing off the things his drug-dealing money bought him. This movie probably would’ve actually worked about a hundred times better if it was just a screwball comedy and they paired James Franco with Will Ferrell and one of the spring break girls were played by Aubrey Plaza. Because at least then the characters would be fun to watch and we could enjoy ourselves. As it is, Spring Breakers takes itself completely seriously, unless I totally missed the point, and tries to come off as a poignant social commentary on how stupid white girls are. Or something like that.

The greatest thing about this movie is that it even fails at its job of being a Christian propaganda film. With all its repetitive shots of titties and slutty girls, it just comes off as a somewhat artsy Girls Gone Wild video. Then by the end, it just devolves into a exploitation film. It’s basically porn for dudes who like pretty young girls in bikinis firing machine guns. If that’s your thing, though, there are far better movies for that. And the hilarious irony of Breakers is that while it strives to be a commentary on the objectification of young girls by all of society, all of society is only going to see this movie because you kind of sort of get to see Vanessa Hudgens naked. Yay.

Go see this movie!