Ah, to be young and violent ...

SPRING BREAKERS (B-minus) - I was going to take a pass on Harmony Korine's neon spectacle, but it was making some annual Top 20 lists, so I popped it to the top of my rental queue. Turns out, it was pretty much what I expected.

Four girls -- three randy blonds and a Jesus-loving brunette (that's the only way Korine tries to distinguish them; otherwise they are interchangeable) -- are left behind on campus with insufficient funds while everyone else is in Florida on spring break, so they do the only sensible thing they can think of: they knock off a fast-food joint. (The good girl merely drives the getaway car.) Soon, they are mixing in with the beautiful bods gyrating and binge-drinking on the beach. (NOTE: This takes place in that special Gidget movie world where every single college kid  in a swimsuit has a perfectly toned body. It isn't until near the end of the movie -- when two women of color show up, interestingly -- that characters have a surplus of natural meat on their bones.)

One of the parties gets busted, and the girls -- still in their colorful bikinis -- end up in court and then in jail, until they are bailed out by a gold-toothed, dreadlocked creep named Alien, played with outlandish actorly zeal by James Franco. The good girl wants to leave, but the others, having greal otten a glimpse of the dark side wielding squirt guns during the earlier heist, are being seduced by the guns, money and drugs and the idea of truly being bad.

Korine offers some wonderfully bizarre touches -- such as Alien inartfully tinkling at an outdoor piano while crafting an impromptu ode to his new "chickies" or the girls breaking into their favorite Britney Spears song in a parking lot and playfully re-creating the heist they just pulled. He also captures some memorable images (like the one of the girls doing handstands in the dorm hallway). Too often, though, Korine is content to cut to stock beach scenes of topless women and frat-boy mayhem.

The question is how far will these young women go? Are they just playing Alien and planning to rob him of his stash? Like the pampered girls in "The Bling Ring" (with their hardcore rap soundtrack), do they think they can live the gangsta life? Are they too stupid to realize what they've gotten into? Are they on a journey to find their true selves? Are they safe because it's not really a scary guy but just James Franco hamming it up and merely pretending to be one?

Korine never lets on here. He's content with splashing the screen with his eye-popping images (color-enhanced in post-production to great effect). For me, this never managed to rise above a mix of "Fast Times at Ridgemont High" and "Natural Born Killers." My date, from the female perspective, enjoyed this more, connecting with the young women and their daring walk on the wild side.

The last straw for me was the ending, which is just ridiculous. I'm absolutely sick of shoot-outs in which an average joe with a gun takes out a whole battalion of gangsters who can't shoot straight or land even one glancing bullet. If Korine was trying to remind us that life is random and absurd, well, then a few points for him. But I don't think that was his plan. He was just trying to use highly stylized violence and bright-yellow bikinis to show us how cool it can be to be bad.