Irresistible force

It's a Spice World after all

by Gary Susman

SPICE WORLD. Directed by Bob Spiers. Written by Kim Fuller. With Melanie Brown, Emma Bunton, Melanie Chisholm, Geri Halliwell, Victoria Adams, Richard E. Grant, Alan Cumming, George Wendt, Claire Rushbrook, Mark McKinney, Richard O'Brien and Roger Moore. A Columbia Pictures release. At the Harbour Mall, Holiday, Showcase, Tri-Boro, Westerly, and Woonsocket cinemas.

Spice World is essentially critic-proof. Not because the movie is too innocuous to merit a rabid panning, or because 50 million Spice Girls fans can't be wrong, or even because the target demographic for the film is too young to care what any grown-up writes about the movie. Rather, it's that the Spice Girls, who have cannily marketed themselves through shameless overexposure, are just as shrewd at deflecting the critical backlash by anticipating it.

Spice World, which purports to follow several days in the Spice Girls' busy lives as they prepare for an important concert, spends a lot of time poking fun at the quintet's public image, but even more time lacerating the media, from the scandal-hungry British tabloids to the very Hollywood bigwigs releasing this movie. If, as Spice World implies, you can't believe anything you learn about the Spice Girls from the papers or television, you can't believe what this film tells you either. The Spice Girls thus emerge with their mystique, their damaging secrets, their embarrassing truths still protected by the impenetrable façade of their public personas. Can they really sing? Are they really that nice? Are they secretly on ego trips, or at war with one another, or leading steamy romantic lives? After seeing the movie, you still won't know for sure.

The portraits of the five Girls are deliberately superficial (unless they're really that shallow!), establishing personality through a series of tepid running gags. For example, Sporty Spice (Melanie Chisholm) is . . . obsessed with sports! Posh Spice (Victoria Adams) . . . is fixated on clothes and make-up! Scary Spice (Melanie Brown) likes to say things that are mildly outrageous. Baby Spice (Emma Bunton) is so cute and innocent that she can smile her way out of trouble. And Ginger Spice (Geri Halliwell), the smart one, spouts useless trivia about marine biology.

The Spice Girls flit from one public appearance to another aboard a customized English double-decker bus, laughing and gossiping and talking about clothes as they make their way through the movie's gumball-colored universe. (Young girls should love Spice World; it's a 90-minute pajama party.) Tagging along are a frazzled manager (an aptly apoplectic Richard E. Grant), a down-to-earth personal assistant (Secrets & Lies' Claire Rushbrook), an authorized documentarian (Alan Cumming), and an unauthorized, creepy paparazzo (Rocky Horror's Richard O'Brien). Both the pretentious filmmaker and the mercenary photographer dream of piercing the veil to reveal the "real" Spice Girls; neither succeeds.

There's also a team from Hollywood (George Wendt and Mark McKinney) trying to pitch the Spice Girls on various horrible ideas for movies. Late in Spice World, it becomes clear that they've sold the quintet on the film we're now watching, whose patent silliness and implausibility is another winking sign that this portrayal of what the Girls are really like is not to be believed. The working model here is the Beatles' A Hard Day's Night, but where that film seemed spontaneous and revelatory about the Fab Four's personalities, Spice World seems as impromptu as a Soviet May Day parade. As Grant's Clifford says, "If they want to be spontaneous, they have to clear it with me first."

Still, there are some surprises, some very weird jokes and cameos that will baffle youngsters, not because they're risqué but because they're arcane. The bus driver is played by Meat Loaf (20 years after Roadie and millions of records later, he's still driving a bus for other pop stars), who gets a punch line that is a tortured reworking of one of his hit-song titles. One character muses on the fleetingness of fame and then orders a drink from a bartender who turns out to be Elvis Costello. In keeping with the swinging-London motif (less Beatles than Austin Powers), Clifford ultimately answers to a Chief who resembles a James Bond villain (he's played by Roger Moore, and instead of stroking a cat, he strokes a piglet) and who speaks in inscrutable, belligerent CEO-isms built on barnyard metaphors.

The Chief isn't evil. He's just a fact of life, an omnipotent, impregnable incarnation of entertainment-state global capitalism (hence the pig?). So are the Spice Girls. Resistance is futile.

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Welcome to their World

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