Spears’ looks, presence carry audiences through ‘Crossroads’
Britney Spears is an extremely attractive and clever girl who knows exactly how to shake her assets and make anyone fall head over heels in love with her.
She’s gone a long way on her looks, and she realizes her virginal sex-kitten persona is the main reason people want watch her do something — anything — just as long as she is shaking her moneymaker.
That rationale is the best reason to see the pop princess’ feature film debut in “Crossroads,” which is laughably bad on nearly every level.
In her first scene, we see Spears’ character, Lucy, prancing around her bedroom in her girly unmentionables lip synching to Madonna’s “Open Your Heart.”
Moments later, Lucy’s overprotective father, played robotically by Dan Aykroyd, makes his first appearance and lets us know Lucy is the hard-working high school valedictorian who should stop having fun and think about her future.
She’s a sad, nerdy girl who is totally uncool.
And on the verge of high school graduation, she looks back on her high school career and realizes she never had fun because of her demanding study habits.
Lucy’s only friend seems to be her dorky lab partner, played by Justin Long from “Jeepers Creepers,” because the other, more popular kids call her mean things like “perfect,” “sweet,” “nerdy” and — gasp! — a VIRGIN!
She has no relationship with her two best childhood friends, Kit (Zoe Saldana) and Mimi (Taryn Manning), but the three of them reconcile their differences on graduation night and decide to leave their small Georgia town and head for the bright lights and big cities of California.
Each girl is using the trip as a means to pursue her own agenda: Lucy wants to find her mother, who abandoned her at the age of three; Kit wants to see her California frat-boy fiancé; and the knocked-up Mimi wants to become a bright, shining star in the music biz.
Along for the ride is Ben (Anson Mount), a stubble-faced, brooding guitar player who listens to rock music and may or may not have done some jail time for murder — a lame, on-going joke throughout the film.
The group has many experiences that bond them together over the course of the trip, and in an obligatory plot element in these types of movies, Ben and Lucy flirt non-stop and eventually fall in love.
As the two lovebirds grow closer, they come to the realization that they can have sex, and Lucy eventually relinquishes her virginal crown of purity to the handsome loner.
Sorry, there is no actual Britney love scene; just the standard PG-13 kiss, fade out, then fade in to see the lovers in their pj’s lying in bed.
While Spears’ ability as an actress surpasses expectations — many were expecting her to make Mariah Carey look like Merryl Streep — her performance, like the film, is amateurish at best.
Aside from Britney’s booty-shakin’ scenes involving a faux strip tease in a hotel room, her singing “I Love Rock n’ Roll” in a New Orleans bar and dancing around in her underwear, “Crossroads” is definitely a film that is easily forgettable and should be crossed off anyone’s list of movies to see.
J. Colin Trisler