Hardly criminal masterminds, the group posted pictures of themselves on facebook and twitter and generally boasted about their exploits, so it wasn't a huge surprise when they were tracked down and arrested - ironically becoming (albeit briefly) as big a media circus as the stars they followed.
This being in the same zip-code as Rodeo Drive, jail-time was only slightly less certain than a book deal and movie pitch.
The problem with The Bling Ring is that it uses that age-old excuse and fallback position of movies that any failures are not its own but the nature of the subject. Thus, you supposedly can't complain that a film about the petty exploits of boring, vacuous, materialistic adolescent girls ultimately has all the depth of a Paris Hilton sponsored puddle.
Except I can - and I'm going to.
...because The Bling Ring is exactly that: ninety pointless minutes of following a group of girls whose main attribute is that their designer-brand knock-off brains have amazingly made the intuitive leap that while celebrities are out partying at night-clubs, tracked by paparazzi, their mansions are empty and often left naively unprotected. As a result we trail them from house to house, club to club and facebook status to tweeted photograph like some cut-price scavenger hunt of excess.
The crime here is not that Paris Hilton's wardrobe, which looks like Liberace redecorated Narnia, has been pilfered, but that Sophia Coppola has utterly wasted the opportunity to do anything interesting with what COULD have been a goldmine of irony.
Yes, there are the briefest moments where real opportunities shine through. When being interviewed about her arrest, Emma Watson's Nikki blinks Bambi-like at the camera professing that she's treating this as a learning experience and hopes to help the needy in Africa... but we don't know if this is demonstrating the stupidity of the sticky-fingered felon or the smarter girl once again playing dumb to get what she wants. And, frankly, we don't really care.
Instead of gently rolling her eyes, Coppola should really have furrowed her brow and spent more time looking through the lens to dissect her subject-matter. How are the over-privileged allowed to get away with crimes? Why is the media so interested in the banal? Who's being most manipulated - the girls, the 'celebs', the media, or - heaven help us - the audience? By the time the credits roll, we've learned nothing about our cast of characters nor even attempted to scratch the surface. Flimsier than a faux Jimmy-Choo boot-strap, nothing holds together.
The film's conclusion that 'the girls simply didn't know better but isn't that, y'know, like totally kinda wacky and ironic to the max?' is the sort of conclusion that leads one to ask not why the girls did the crime, but why anyone spent the time making a film about it? If it's such a first-world crime and so little is offered in explanation, then isn't there some paint drying elsewhere that would make a finer subject? Wouldn't a documentary have been better?
With this and a horribly-misjudged appearance in This is the End, it's obvious that Harry Potter's Emma Watson is trying to distance herself from her days at Hogwarts. But on the strength of these choices, her agent needs to tread firmer ground and Coppola - usually more reliable - needs to find her feet again.
4/10
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