STAR RATING: ***** Saturday Night **** Friday Night *** Friday Morning ** Sunday Night * Monday Morning
A made for TV biopic of the pop icon Britney Spears (Natasha Bassett), from starting out with her breakthrough single Baby One More Time in 1999, where she was shoved into the limelight by her pushy mother Lynne (Nicole Oliver) and domineering manager Larry Rudolph (Peter Benson), who both naively thought she was old and mature enough to handle such massive media exposure and pushed her to lie about her virginity to keep up an illusion, through to the trials and turbulence of her relationships with Justin Timberlake (Nathan Keyes) and Kevin Federline (Clayton Chitty), before a revealing 2008 documentary aired.
Sometimes, something can give you a really bad vibe, yet you still feel utterly compelled to see it. Your instinct can tell you it looks really bad, and you can see no end of bad reviews, and you can almost write a review before you've even seen it, but still you're still interested in the subject matter and you just have to see it yourself. While I've never been a massive fan of her music, something about Britney Spears has always captivated me and kept my attention, being such an icon of popular culture as she is. For all this, though, I've never gotten the feeling she was comfortable with this status, and so a dramatisation of her life, as inevitable as it was, was never something I thought she'd be happy about (and, from what's been said, that's definitely the case with this.)
Such a popular name is Britney, that a big studio could quite willingly have thrown its clout behind a production of her life, so why this no budget monstrosity is even in existence is ripe for question. And what little budget it must have had, as the terrible production values are in evidence from the opening credits, and from there, like a crashing plane whirling down from the sky, it just becomes an even bigger amateurish, terribly made mess. Lead star Bassett looks, and pretty much sounds, nothing like the real Britney, and her portrayal of her is just excruciating, as is Nathan Keyes's cringe-worthy performance as first love Justin. You never get the feeling you're watching a real life unfolding, just a corny, overblown childish imagining.
This is just the typical sort of thing you see on the Hallmark Channel/True Entertainment, only the worst kind of example, and one which you can really see from the outset and just trust your instincts on. NO STARS.
