aSPiRING lawBREAKERS

Okay, not our most intellectual of choices for a Friday night movie. But could we go wrong with skimpy swimwear and James Franco?

If it weren't for all that swimwear and the excess partying, we might have thought that the "breakers" part of the title referred to the writers, who seemed to have had a relatively easy job if they were not, in fact, on a break. How many times can you repeat the words "Spring Break" in a mocking and menacing tone before the writers realize that they have possibly cut and pasted the same line too many times? A couple of gems, though: "Are you jacked up on Jesus?" was my personal favourite.

Basic premise: four friends have tried to amass enough money to make the trip to Florida for Spring Break from their college in a small town somewhere. They haven't succeeded. So three of them get the excellent idea to steal a professor's El Camino, arm themselves with a squirt gun full of alcohol and what looked like a meat tenderizer and rob the local diner and everyone in it. Enough money for the trip and a bonfire as they burn the El Camino after their getaway.

Crazy bus ride to Florida and then it's wild party after wild party until the police descend on a party and put our four friends in the same cell at the local jail. The judge gives them a fine or two days more in jail, setting them up to be liberated by the benevolent intervention of the local hoodlum played by James Franco. I was dreading the kind of "benevolence" he might show them, but none of my fears came to pass.

Might I just say that Franco's smooth-talking character was extra creepy for me especially because of his presumably gold tooth-armour. Okay, not armour, but a mouth full of metal that must surely have been a little difficult to speak around. I was surprised when the girls who eventually kissed him didn't balk at it. For him, though, a status symbol of which he was most proud indeed.

They lost the most timid of their foursome early on (back to college on the bus) and then set out to rob all the Spring Break enthusiasts they could, a task surely rendered easier by their various states of inebriation and undress. They did this with a scarily impressive array of weapons that were, shall we say, more real than the water gun. The girls handled these like pros, though, as I guess one would with an extensive background in alcohol shooting and meat tenderizing.

They lost another of their number to the bus home after she was injured by a rival gangster's spraying their Camaro with machine gun fire. After that, I thought for a moment that things might be going the wrong way for Franco's character, as the two remaining girls had him on the bed with some very real and loaded guns stuck in his mouth. He turned it around, though, giving an apparently expert blowjob to one of the guns….

Then it was off to avenge the earlier attack. Franco was shot partway down the pier, but out two pink balaclava and bikini wearing gals from up north shot their way through the entire contingent of armed lackeys of the rival gangster and then shot him in his own Jacuzzi. Not a scratch on either of them, as you might expect. No police intervention either.

At least they drove off in a better car than their host's shot-up Camaro – it looked like a Lamborghini. I hope they also remembered to gather up some of the cash that was lying around.

To recap: credible plot, intricate script, excellent acting. Oh, and sarcastic reviewer.