Review of The Bling Ring (2013) by Michael C — 04 Aug 2014

I was sceptical going into this as I had heard mixed things. Some had said that it was too empty and flat, while others thought it captured the essence of the L.A. lifestyle.

I am very much in the middle ground here, as the general message of the film is that this generation is obsessed with meaningless things, and this shows that in it's most ridiculous forms. I have heard comments that the characters were two dimensional, but I think that it works in this movie as that is who the characters are, and are also adding up to the bigger picture of the film. That we are living in a plastic world.

The main problem I had is that the film still did drag, and it quickly became repetitive due to the source material being that these people went to celebrities houses and stole things. There's not much more to it, and it definitely felt like it had been drawn out. The visual style is interesting, and there is a great panning shot that slowly zooms into a house as they slowly raid it.

As a whole though, when it ends it didn't leave me with anything to think or say. You got the account. You got told that the world was plastic from the beginning, but the characters themselves never felt like they had been fully realized in the story, and what they represented.

My favourite section of the film was the third act, as everything starts to go wrong, and I thought the last scene of the movie had an interesting message to say, but as a whole it was alright, but it could have been better.