Spice World

Spice World
December 15, 1997
Columbia
Musical, Comedy
VHS
C+

This movie has of course dated badly, but let me first offer you some background on where I'm coming from, because my criticisms are probably not the usual ones.  My housemate of the time (still one of my dearest friends) was then a 21-year-old gay man who loved the Spice Girls and he'd play their music a lot.  Since I like pop music, I soon grew to like them.  I was never a great fan, but I could tell them apart.  (Well, to this day I can't remember which is Mel B. and which Mel C., but I knew their Spice identities.)  He, I, and another of his besties went to see this movie.  At almost 30, I was the oldest woman there who wasn't accompanied by a preteen daughter.  We had a blast, with the goofiness and the music.

Watching it now, when the Girls breaking up is no longer a plot complication and it's hard to remember their international popularity, what's left is a movie that did not exactly do for the Spices what A Hard Day's Night did for the Beatles one-third of a century earlier.  I want to like this movie more, at least on a camp level, but the problem is that it does not in fact present a "Spice World."  They don't dominate the screen like the Beatles did.  There are too many sideplots and side characters, with the girls offscreen too much of the time.  Even when we get to see them perform or joke around, there are too many interruptions and cuts away.  And there's a scene where the girls play dress-up, as each other and as various female icons, but much of the impact is lost when I can't tell most of them apart in long-shot.  I will say that the music remains catchy, but I'd rather watch a set of their videos, where their energy isn't thwarted as it is here.

There are lots and lots of cameos, most of them wasted, e.g. Roger Moore doing a Blofeld satire that seems feeble after Dr. Evil.  Jonathan Ross plays himself, as he did in The Tall Guy, but that's pretty meaningless to an American.  And having Barry Humphries appear out of Dame Edna Everage drag seems a little pointless.  (This is 19 years after his brief appearance in Sgt. Pepper by the way.)  On the other hand, I realize that most people don't care that I was happy to see Neil Mullarkey show up, even if it's just for one line.  Bob Hoskins is in a brief sight gag, pretending to be Ginger.  (Don't ask.)  Elvis Costello appears 18 years after Americathon, but much more briefly.

Another Americathon survivor, Meat Loaf, is, no, not a roadie, but a bus driver for the Spices.  Alan Cumming, who's usually entertainingly awkward (as he was in Emma and Romy & Michele, and as he would be again in Josie and the Pussycats), is just awkward here.  Hugh Laurie does the best he can in one scene as Poirot (where Baby Spice gets away with murder), but his old friend Stephen Fry almost steals the movie in his scene as a stern judge.

Note, the joke about a potential Clinton scandal of him tucking his shirt into his underwear became ironic by the time this film hit America.

Like animals in the zoo, as baffled by us as we are by them.