Spring Break

Spring Break follows friends Nelson (David Knell) and Adam (Perry Lang) as they arrive in Fort Lauderdale to party and meet girls, with complications ensuing as the pair find themselves sharing a hotel room with two wild, inhibition-free guys (Paul Land’s Stu and Steve Bassett’s O.T.). There’s ultimately not a whole lot more to Spring Break than that, as filmmaker Sean S. Cunningham, working from David Smilow’s screenplay, delivers a meandering and palpably overlong narrative that’s rife with countless scenes of various characters having fun and getting into high jinks – and yet there’s little doubt that the picture’s energetic atmosphere does, from time to time, prove awfully difficult to resist. It’s nevertheless impossible to not to wish Cunningham had eschewed certain excessively hoary conventions and spent just a little more time developing the protagonists (beyond their most outward attributes, that is), while the unapologetically episodic structure ensures that certain portions of the proceedings fare much, much better than others (eg the entire first act is pretty much disposable, ultimately). Still, Spring Break‘s fun-loving, good-vibes sensibilities ensure that the movie, at the very least, remains watchable for the duration of its needlessly padded-out 102 minutes.

**1/2 out of ****