By Avalon Doyle, Contributor
3/5
Harmony Korine’s latest flick, Spring Breakers (released March 29), is set in sunny Florida to a backdrop of hard-hitting dubstep and filled with a plethora of cocaine-fuelled, bikini-clad babes on spring break. This may sound like the beginning of a cinematic masterpiece for young men everywhere, but Korine takes his viewers into a bizarre world of pink ski mask wearing sociopaths that becomes anything but expected.
Spring Breakers is well-represented with familiar faces, featuring Selena Gomez as good-girl Faith, Vanessa Hudgens as Candy, Pretty Little Liars’ Ashley Benson as Brit, and Rachel Korine (Harmony’s wife) as Cotty. The four play college girls who resort to desperate measures to make it to Tampa for spring break. The most surprising cast member is James Franco as Alien, a white, drug-dealing rapper. His character, donning Hawaiian shirts and an atrocious-looking platinum grill, acts as a grotesque representation of the capitalistic American dream who rescues the girls, only to get them into deeper trouble. Although Alien is wildly overdone, the talented Franco makes the viewer believe that Alien may, to the horror of parents everywhere, actually exist.
Korine shines in his ability to show authentic-feeling moments of wild inebriated bliss that only cocaine and alcohol induced intoxication can achieve, despite entirely missing the point of coherent storytelling. But the real success of Spring Breakers is the way it leaves the viewer feeling simultaneously amazed and horrified in the leading ladies’ insatiable appetites for destructive thrill-seeking that almost makes up for the film’s tedious repetition.
So if you’re looking to escape exams for a short time, this mind-numbing, wild ride could be just the spring break your brain needs.
