This is otherwise known as the movie where Disney “angels” (Selena Gomez and Vanessa Hudgins) fall. They, along with two anonymous and interchangeable white girls go on a drug and booze fueled Spring Break with a few of them (but not Gomez) participating in a robbery to get down there. The label of “Disney girls gone wild” is a little misleading as Selena is the “good girl” of the group (named Faith and from a religious background) and she never does anything all that wild, and Vanessa is 25 years old and loooong past the Disney/teen label anyway.
The girls themselves are a little hard to distinguish or identify with since only Selena’s Faith is given a personality and she isn’t fully involved in the rest of the shenanigans (she has the least screen time of any of them), BUT there is a standout, jaw-dropping performance in the movie that isn’t receiving nearly the amount of attention…
What Works: James Franco shows up about halfway through and completely hijacks the film, making it all the better for it. He portrays Alien, a corn-rowed, grill-toothed wigger who would have been played as a caricature in a different movie. But Franco makes him fascinatingly ambiguous. You have no idea if he’s a complete idiot or an extremely shrewd shark who can see right through people (his scene with Selena Gomez is the most electric in the movie). Is he really dangerous or just a “facebook gangsta” mimicking everything he’s learned from Scarface? Franco is on to something here by playing such a self-conscious, media age-thug, one with “philosophies” like “Spring Break forever” and “Life is about big booties y’all.” The movie wants to be about the murky morality of hedonism-at-all-costs-living, but only Alien really comes close to making that come alive.
What Doesn’t Work: As I pointed out earlier, I could barely tell two of the 4 girls apart, Vanessa Hudgins isn’t asked to do much more than smile, and Selena isn’t in the movie that much, and her “good girl” feels a little…too good. It’s like you can feel her handlers right off to the side of the camera. The movie never invests in any of the core group as characters, and if Franco hadn’t shown up this might have been a pretty boring Spring Break, not good for something that is trying so hard to be outrageous.
What I Would Have Done Differently: The washed-out, free-floating camera work and editing is meant to suggest the druggy, nothing-matters style the characters live in but rather than immerse us in their point of view it actually distances them from us.