1255. Spice World (1997)

Starring: The Spice Girls, Richard E. Grant, Claire Rushbrook

Director: Bob Spiers

Running Time: 92 mins

Spice World is a British film about the adventures of the world famous girl group in and around London in the days leading up to a big live concert at the Albert Hall.

This film isn’t meant to be an Oscar winner. It’s not meant to give you a proper insight into the day-to-day lives of the Spice Girls, and it’s definitely not meant to be taken seriously. So, in that light, you can have a lot of fun with Spice World, and, rather to my surprise, I really did. It’s not a good film by any means from a critical perspective, but it’s got the vibe of a throwaway, so-bad-it’s-good guilty pleasure that makes it infectiously enjoyable.

Spice World is basically made in the same vein as The Beatles’ A Hard Day’s Night. Is it as rebellious as that film? No. However, there are numerous occasions throughout Spice World where the fun takes over from the terrible excuse for a plot, and that’s when it feels most like A Hard Day’s Night, and, at times, even more fun.

Put simply, the comedy and hijinks that the girls get themselves into are often so surreal that you just can’t help but laugh your socks off. There are scenes in this film that are just randomly dropped in, and have absolutely no effect on the rest of the movie. Whether it be the odd daydream, Roger Moore playing Blofeld, or aliens meeting the Spice Girls (yes, ALIENS), there are moments here that are so bizarre that they’re absolutely hilarious, and that’s where a lot of the enjoyability comes from.

And whilst a lot of the laughs I got out of this film were from how bad it was, there is an element of self-referential humour here. When directly intended to take the mick out of itself, it’s generally not that funny, but the fact that you have that sort of humour in this film shows that they didn’t want this to be taken too seriously. It’s definitely far worse than intended, but at least it’s a sort of funny bad movie, not one that tried hard to be good and came out just dull.

Moving onto some of the proper negatives now, and the main issue that I do have with Spice World is the writing. There seems to be some sort of a plot that strings the random events together, but it’s completely impossible to follow, and in the end insanely convoluted, whilst the dialogue is generally pretty poor (not helped by the fact that the Spice Girls aren’t the world’s greatest actors, although better than I expected).

Overall, I enjoyed Spice World. That doesn’t mean it’s a good film, because it certainly isn’t, but as so-bad-it’s good movies go, this is definitely one of the better ones, and that’s why it gets a 5.3 from me.