Spring Breakers - Well shot, but could have been so much better

I had high hopes for `Spring Breakers' judging by the trailers and marketing, however, sadly I came away feeling a little let down.

It's about a quarter of attractive young ladies who decide to join their (equally unbelievable attractive peers) on the beach during Spring break. However, they don't have the money. So they decide to steal it. This presents the first of the film's problems. It's hard to have much sympathy for central characters who, when faced with not having enough cash, just choose to rob someone at gunpoint. Then, when they get to the beach, they just party, party, party, taking drugs, drinking and `hanging out' with the lads, never really thinking much about what they've done.

Finally, the party they happen to be at gets raided by the police and they have to spend two days in the slammer. Therefore, they feel massively aggrieved at having their partying interrupted and choose to hang out with a borderline psychotic drug dealer/arms dealer/murderer/gangster. Again, we have to wonder about these girls' choice of judgement. From there, it only gets worse as they decide to continue this dodgy relationship and mix with the city's underworld.

Despite, having possibly the least likable cast list since Jar Jar Bink's Chistmas family gathering, there is some good stuff in there. It's well-shot. The direction is slick and many scenes are visually stunning on the eye. Sadly, that's about it. Most of the film is `filler.' By that I mean extended shots of semi-naked girls gyrating to tunes I don't like (yes, I am over thirty). If this film cut all this out, it would probably only be about twenty minutes long! I got it: the girls are sexy, but I'd rather see them being sexy in a STORY than just dancing like they were in a pop video.

Despite having a promising story idea, i.e. girls funding their holiday by ill-gotten gains, you just have a bunch of really shallow people dancing for an hour and a half. By the end of it, you probably won't care who lives and who dies. Also, I found the ending a little unrealistic, but I won't go into that for fear of spoiling it for you. I'm sure Spring Breakers has an audience somewhere, but I just found it was like having MTV on in the background while you did other things.

5/10 a hard trek, a bit like unicycling to Mordor and back