Sofia Coppola is a talented director but not much of a writer and she fumbles what should have been sure fire material for her. This tale of vapid young things in LA robbing the houses of rich, famous vapid young things has plenty of neat touches but makes all its points in the first ten minutes then repeats them incessantly: they're shallow, inspired by a shallow society with shallow parents; there are lots of designer clothes, and endless dancing in nightclubs and taking selfies and putting things on Facebook.
This sort of repetitive story telling is more forgiveable if there is decent characterisation to compensate but it was hard to tell the girls apart - one seemed to be the ringleader, one was Emma Watson, one had a boyfriend (only one... it's a remarkably sexless film for all the racy posing), one was a gay boy, one was young. There's not much more - just selfies and dancing and being shallow.
The break in sequences are very unsuspenseful, which I guess was the point (the real life criminals just sort of rocked up and broke in, succeeding via audacity and their targets' stupidity more than anything else) but there's a lot of these sequences and having a lot of unsuspenseful sequences doesn't add up to anything much. Ditto such seemingly sure fire material as the cops closing in.
It looks great - Coppola's films always have a strong design and costume component - and the music suits it and the cast all look their parts at least. But this got on my nerves.
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