This spring break movie will break your heart— it’s that bad

Spring break is one of the most mythologized events in the media, with depictions of attractive young people engaging in all sorts of debauchery flooding television, films and the public imagination for decades.

What would happen if you took all that naughty fun, threw in two irrelevant “American Idol” finalists, set it to music and filtered the whole affair with a Catholic nun’s idea of what counts as debauchery? Well, you would get a much better film than 2003’s failure of a spring-break film “From Justin to Kelly”.

The best thing I can say about the film is that it is only 80 minutes long, sparing the audience from the abysmal acting and nonexistent “plot”. Of those 80 minutes the first ten or so are made up of boring filler.

The movie tries to be raunchy and edgy during this time, but, aside from a single shot of a whipped cream bikini contest, it is the most conservative spring break in movie history. There is exactly one scene involving alcohol, and there is absolutely no sex or suggestions thereof of any kind. The characters don’t even wear anything that doesn’t cover them from the thighs up for most of the film. So right from the get-go it is a failed Spring Break movie.

The acting was miserable, with Kelly (Kelly Clarkson) looking determined to make every one of her lines fall flat and Justin (Justin Guarini) not much better. The average high school play has more convincing romantic leads. During their climactic love song the two don’t even look at each other once, and their chemistry can be described as nonexistent at best. The best acting in the film came from me pretending to care about the characters. Nobody cared at all about this movie, and it really shows.

I would insult the soundtrack, but I can’t remember a single song from it. All of them sound the same, and it is a boring sound. Clarkson and Guarini over-sing, because the karaoke competition they won to become “famous” rewarded that, and, as a result, the soundtrack is so bad that 20th Century Fox didn’t even release it.

The “plot” is amazingly thin: One of Kelly’s friends, Alexa (Katherine Bailess), is jealous of how cool and pretty Kelly is, so she gets Justin to think that he was texting Kelly when he was really texting her. She tries to drive a wedge between them with this. She fails, and when her “nefarious schemes” come to light she apologizes. And that’s the end. Nothing else is relevant to the plot in the 80 minute run-time.

This is a truly special movie. It is not often you find a Spring Break film meant to cash in on success and market to young people completely fail as a movie, fail to make any money and fail to attract an audience, young or otherwise. I give it a 35/100.