Feminist Sweepstakes, Part 1

THE BLING RING (B) - This one might be a victim of high expectations and the small screen.

I really was looking forward to the latest from Sofia Coppola, back on the upswing after faltering with "Marie Antoinette" and reviving with the under-appreciated gem "Somewhere."

Unfortunately, this tale of a Hollywood teen burglary ring is sabotaged by a so-so cast and the sinking feeling that there's nothing really at stake here -- either for the undersupervised kids or the rich celebrities who probably don't even miss most of the tchotchkes that are swiped. We are asked to spend 90 minutes with shallow girls (and their safe gay pal) from a school for dropouts who crave the life of the shallow celebrities they read about and discover how easy it is to rob the stars' homes when they're out of town. (I doubt it really is as easy as checking the news to see who's traveling, Googling their address and then finding a key under the mat or a back door conveniently open; do celebs really have such lax security or never hire a house sitter?) Our hopes are raised at first with wonderfully blase dialogue ("Mischa Barton got a DUI," one character monotones while digging for Paris Hilton news), but the TMZ trash talk gets old quickly.

Katie Chang (as Rebecca) is adequately menacing as the instigator. Taissa Farmiga (Sam) manages a few flashes of zing (especially when wielding a gun the girls find in Megan Fox's house). But Emma Watson (Nikki) comes off as a child actress (she's in her 20s now). Israel Broussard (Mark) is flat as the low-self-esteem dupe who goes along with the girls and scores some killer pink pumps. Claire Julien (Chloe) is underutilized as a fringe member of the gang. These are, for the most part, stupid, soulless teens; why would we expect them to be interesting to watch? Among the adults, Leslie Mann is brilliant in the small role as the clueless New Age-y mom or foster mom of several girls.

Coppola tries to make this all matter. She connects the girls to the celebs by saturating the kids in the club life (where they mostly sit around taking selfies to post on Facebook) or by having them wander around to pot-smoking park outings or classmates' parties, incongruently riffing to rap songs. (They help themselves to other people's pop culture, too.)

The visuals can be stunning. One burglary (at the 37-minute mark) is captured from afar, as the camera gazes longingly at a glass-walled two-story mansion in the hills overlooking LA. We see the small figures flitting from room to room, turning lights on and off, as the camera ever-so-slowly pans in to capture them skulking off. Coppola splashes color to great effect: the silhouettes of the kids prancing across the screen with the christmasy lights of the city twinkling in the background; a backseat-view shot of silhouetted driver and passenger with their neon dashboard lighting the way along a winding road. A sudden car crash feels frighteningly real.

This truly is style over substance. And that may be Coppola's point. I've never begrudged her career's focus on the hollowed-out victims of privilege in 21st century Western civilization. However, she and this cast are content to skim the surface of these girls' descent into the shallow end of modern American culture. Coppola captured such ennui much better with Stephen Dorff's Cobainish actor zombie in the elegant "Somewhere"; here she seems to be spinning her wheels as a storyteller while seeming to be as much of a starfucker as her bling ring is by employing actual stars and using their actual homes and name-dropping designer after designer from her own real world.

In the end, the courtroom denouement and celeb news reports leave us empty. The kids trundle off to prison, where, you suspect, the story is about to get more fascinating. But Coppola isn't interested in some gritty, raw drama; instead, we get one more celeb-style interview and a final Lindsay Lohan reference and the roll of the credits.

Next up in Part 2: "In a World ..."