Spring Breakdown

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What’s the Story?

Three young women: Gayle O'Brien (Amy Poehler), Becky St. Germaine (Parker Posey) and Judi Joskow (Rachel Dratch), have been best friends since college. They were nerds then, and even though they stuck together and their friendship was strong, they longed to be "cool" and popular. SPRING BREAKDOWN finds them fifteen years later and nothing's changed. They're single working women, still feeling like outsiders. When Becky's boss, Senator Kay Bee Hartmann (Jane Lynch doing a dead-on parody of... Jane Lynch), sends her to watch over her daughter Ashley (Amber Tamblyn), Gayle and Judi join her. The three bring their blissful obliviousness to the non-stop drunken party, where they find that Ashley is more like them than the "in-crowd" she's courting. Many beers and much dirty dancing later, Ashley saves what minor self-respect she has, and our heroines return to reality a little bit (very little) wiser.

Is It Any Good?

After the enormous success of bawdy comedies in which inept, socially-awkward man-boys find joy and solace in each other's company (Superbad, Role Models, I Love You Man), three very talented women go for the gold for their gender.

Unfortunately, they wind up humiliating themselves in a movie with too little story, too few laughs, and amateurish production values that led them straight to DVD-land. It's a frenzy of skimpy bikinis, racy dialogue, drunken partying, and women trying way too hard to be stupider and more unconscious than they look. Could it be that it's impossible for women to appear that clueless?