Cast: Britney Spears, Zoe Saldana, Anson Mount, Taryn Manning, Dan Aykroyd, Kim Cattrall
Director: Tamra Davis
Producers: Ann Carli
Screenplay: Shonda Rhimes
Cinematography: Eric Alan Edwards
Music: Trevor Jones
U.S. Distributor: Paramount Pictures
And the moral of the story is... you don't need talent to go a long way, just good marketing and merchandising.
Crossroads is the latest in a long line of vanity projects for singers who are under the mistaken impression that, just because they can strut their stuff in MTV videos and pack auditoriums for concerts, they can act. Acting requires a little more skill and talent than the average singer can muster. There have been exceptions, of course, but not many, and Britney Spears isn't one of them. Spears' acting deficiencies go far beyond being unable to utter a line of dialogue with conviction - throughout Crossroads, she resembles a posed Barbie doll, down to the plastic face with the vacuous expression. I realize this review isn't going to endear me to Spears' legion of devout fans, but those 10-14 year old girls in the Britney camp have already bought into the hype. Charisma and draw trump substance; Britney's lyrics make ABBA seem deep, but her record company and sponsors love her as much as her fans.
Crossroads is a road trip, which is probably easy enough to guess from the title. With a script this bad, it probably wouldn't have been appreciably more watchable had there been a genuinely capable actress in the lead role. Spears just cements the movie's creative doom and enhances the boredom level. I have never been a big fan of road pictures. Occasionally, one comes along that's worth seeing, but, for the most part, the trip seems like an opportunity to stretch out a story that is inherently too thin to support a feature-length motion picture. Such is obviously the case here. Crossroads is only 90 minutes long - a modest running time for a movie. However, when, near the end of the film, a character remarks that the journey "seems to have taken a million years", I found myself nodding my head vigorously in wholehearted agreement.
The story is developed using standard building blocks and familiar character types. Three newly-graduated high school seniors are making a cross-country trek in a convertible. Their destination: Los Angeles. Lucy (Britney Spears) is headed west to locate her long-lost mother - a woman who abandoned her and her sadsack loser of a father (Dan Aykroyd) when she was three years old. Kit (Zoe Saldana), the local Ms. Popular, is curious why her boyfriend, who currently resides in California, keeps postponing their wedding date. And Mimi (Taryn Manning), who is pregnant, wants to enter a songwriting contest and find a good adopted home for her unborn baby. Their driver is Ben (Anson Mount), a twenty-something hunk with a mysterious past who develops a thing for Lucy.
Crossroads is one of those movies that tells three equally uninteresting stories in parallel. On top of that, the key scene of the film - the confrontation between Lucy and her mother (Kim Cattrall, in a blink-and-you'll-miss-it cameo) - has been left out. That's like Titanic without the iceberg. Maybe the sequence was in the script and wasn't filmed because it was obvious that Spears couldn't handle the emotional weight, or maybe it was never written. Whatever the reason, its absence leaves a gaping hole in Crossroads' dramatic envelope (insofar as the word "dramatic" is appropriate in this context). The movie has more contrivances than the average theater has sticky spots on the floor, several of which are designed to give Britney the opportunity to "sing" (despite the nature of her primary career, her voice is not one of her strongest traits). If the filmmakers wanted a warbling Britney, why not develop a screenplay in which such singing could happen naturally, rather than twisting, bending, and appending this one?
In a way, it's probably unfair to blame director Tamra Davis exclusively for this debacle. After all, she's toiling in the shadow of a would-be multi-media superstar, making her essentially a hired gun. Nevertheless, it's surprising that she couldn't do something better with the tools at hand. One of her biggest mistakes is trying to play this material straight. Crossroads adopts such a self-important tone that it's embarrassing. Like most movies that take themselves this seriously, Crossroads contains more than a few instances of unintentional humor (the throng of adolescent girls in the audience were giggling uncontrollably during several supposedly "serious" scenes). The good news for Paramount Pictures - if it can be considered "good news" - is that there have been enough horrible movies this year for Crossroads to escape the label of Worst Film Currently Playing in the Local Multiplex. The bad news is that it barely avoids the distinction. For Ms. Spears, an outstanding question is whether she's a little better or a little worse than Mariah Carey in the acting arena - and, considering the additional exposure to both that would be required to make such a determination, that's one contest I don't want to judge.
© 2002 James Berardinelli