The Bling Ring

Trailer- Coming Soon

Misleading trailers. It's becoming an on-running trend in my reviews. The Bling Ring almost looks like a comedy chick flick with the scenes of Emma Watson playing the role of stupid Beverly Hills teenager and generic pop-dance soundtrack.

What The Bling Ring actually is is a dark snapshot look at teenage celebrity worship and disregard to morals and reality. It's a documentary about a group of teens who rob a whole load of celebritys' houses in Beverly Hills with not a lot of fucks given but played out like a drama. There's laughable parts but it's far from a comedy.

My main problem had with The Bling Ring was that the story it was based on wasn't quite interesting enough to warrant an entire ninety minute film. When a drama is based on reality like this it's hard to add plot twists and story arcs when they didn't actually happen. The film is just a series of scenes of the teenagers robbing celebrities' houses shot in different ways. There's only so many times I can watch girls get excited over finding shoes without getting bored. There's probably a whole celebrity fashion element I missed being...well a man but I suppose some people might get a kick out of seeing Paris Hilton's wardrobe. It's like those middle pages of Heat magazine I have no interest in.

And then they get caught [no spoiler, it's one of the first scenes] and not much else happens. It comes down to the characters being interesting which they aren't really with one main exception.

Emma Watson saves this film from being mind-numbingly boring. She plays her character great and it's just nice to see Hermionie Granger being a stuck up bitch. On a deeper level it's through her we see how some teenagers actually are with her self-righteousness and snobbery which is the main point of the film I think- to show how these people actually live.

I also got a small kick out of some of the thumpy music montages of teenagers living life to excess. They're like the old Skins adverts and look pretty cool. They add nothing to the characters themselves or the situations happening but it's visually and audibly quite pleasing.

Finding out about the true story of The Bling Ring was interesting enough but just not quite enough to keep my attention for an entire movie. I think if it had just been a basic hour long documentary on TV I would have enjoyed learning about the group more.

5/10