Review of Showgirls (1995) by Philip C — 21 Dec 2010

Showgirls tells the story of Nomi Malone, a woman who wants to make it big in the big city of Las Vegas as a Showgirl. Yeah, that's about it for plot.

Showgirls is a superficial, style over substance mess of a film that offers lots of naked women and some good dancing but nothing else. The story has honestly nowhere to go and everybody knows it.

I can see it perfectly know back when there were meetings pitched on the idea. "Alright so we've got a movie about a girl who wants to be a stripper/dancer and wants to be famous." "Yeah that sounds great!" "I like this idea!" "This could totally work!" "Alright, well I'm glad that we're all in agreement. Now so we have our first scene where she gets naked...then what? The only other scenes I have so far are that she climbs on top of a guy and gives him a lap-dance and then later they have sex in his pool." "Um...she could snort some coke!", "Or she could push someone down the stairs!", "She could also explore her sexuality and be a little bi-curious (like in Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, but that was a much better movie in basically every aspect)." "Those are all great ideas! Now I just need to fit them in between all of my awesome booby shots!".

Any time that "something" happens to move the "story" along it feels really unecessary and out of place. Oftentimes scenes becomes filler for another round of naked women. Near the end of the film a secondary character gets raped. "Why?" you may be asking yourself. "Why?" is a very good question indeed, because I have no idea either. It feels awkward and highly pointless, sure it moves the plot forward but who am I kidding? There is no plot!

Now I'm sure that nobody watches this film for anything other than the copious amounts of naked Elizabeth Berkley, but her being naked isn't good enough. Story, plot, characters, acting, dialogue and pacing are all parts of a film that need to work and this film pretty much fails on all accounts.

Absolutely none of the characters are interesting at all. I found myself completely uninvested in anything that happened. But I think the main character is where the biggest problem lies. Now this film basically threw Berkley's career down the toilet but I have to give her some props for trying. While she wildly over-acted for about the first half of the movie, the second half she was considerably better.

But her performance doesn't matter when her character is so awful. She just yells and pouts all the time when things don't go her way. She screams and swears at people and storms off far too many times so I laughed every time she did so. Way too over-dramatic. Honestly dear, get a hold of yourself! The world doesn't revolve around you! Now I know that not every protagonist in a story has to be likeable (that's what anti-heroes are for) but they do need at least make you feel somewhat sympathetic to them and their situation. And that didn't happen once, I didn't care at all when things failed for her, in fact I enjoyed it because I laughed at it, often. Now that's not Berkley's fault, it's the way her character is written. So blame the writer(s) for that big failure.

And literally every other character is boring, dull, stupid, laughable and genuinely uninteresting. None of the performances stood out in the film whatsoever. Just like the writing. Every line of dialogue and direction that the film takes is bad in so many ways. It's weak, poor and there are so many badly or underwritten characters.

I could go on and on about how bad it is but you clearly have better movies to watch so I'll end it here. Showgirls is all style, no substance, it has a commited (if at times over-the-top) performance from Elizabeth Berkley, lots of good eye candy but absolutely nothing else to offer which makes it one long and painful bore.