# Spice World (1997)

### reviewed by
Serdar Yegulalp

    Spice World (1998)
    1/2 *
    A movie review by Serdar Yegulalp
    (C)1998 by Serdar Yegulalp

Here we've got a really rare bird: a film so stupid it can't even make fun of itself properly. You know a culture is in trouble when even its trash doesn't stick to your mind.

SPICE WORLD may not be the worst big-name movie ever made -- I'm divided at this point between SPECIES II and MONEY TRAIN, with NORTH in the running -- but it's not even a good crummy movie. It's just crummy. I kept begging for a moment of some halfway genuine wit -- a mistake, a sneeze, a sense that they just grabbed something and ran with it instead of staying with the script. No such luck. That script, by the way, plays out like something they scratched onto a soggy cocktail napkin at a producer's party.

Comparing this movie to A HARD DAY'S NIGHT would be a sinful mistake. A HARD DAY'S NIGHT was conceived as a quick exploitation package to cash in on the Beatles' popularity, but two things happened: one, the Beatles stuck around and became more important than anyone could have guessed; two, the movie was brilliant. Neither exception applies to this film. We get performance segments which are flimsy and witless, padded with revue-type material that doesn't garner a single chuckle, and fistfuls of stuff shoveled in that dates the movie horribly (like a dumb X-FILES gag, complete with halogen flashlights). The Girls are also disturbingly untalented (again, unlike the Beatles) -- there's five of them bleating away up there, and collectively they don't even add up to ONE good singer.

Who are these girls, anyway? Despite their variegated appearances and hairstyles, they're one indistinguishable pulpy blob. What frightens me the most is that like so many other junk-food culture artifacts aimed at the younger set -- the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles or the Power Rangers -- there aren't any real individuals in the group. There's just this kind of amorphous, composite personality that they pass around between them, like the three crones in Greek legend who all shared one eye. I hate reading a great deal into pop-culture phenomena, but if the Spice Girls send a message of any kind, it's twofold: that it's better to subordinate your personality to a premanufactured group identity, and that trash not only sells, but aggressively seeks its own level. Santayana once bemoaned America's love affair with trash, and he noted that it wasn't the trash that bothered him, but the love.

he film's most telling moment: Immediately after a performance, someone tells the Girls, "That was perfect -- without actually being any good." Imagine that. A moment of genuine insight, in the middle of this movie. Maybe there is a God.

    Naah.

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