MOVIE SCENE
'Crossroads' marks Britney Spears' film debut

By Marshall Fine
The (Westchester, N.Y.) Journal News

CROSSROADS (Rated PG-13 for profanity, violence, sex) Two Stars (Fair) Three teen-age girls drive cross-country after high school graduation. One of them is Britney Spears. Does the rest really matter? Starring Britney Spears, Dan Aykroyd. Directed by Tamra Davis. Paramount Pictures, 90 mins.

But then, who isn't?

Acting is really beside the point of a film like "Crossroads," which marks Spears' debut as a movie star. If anything, the movie is a way to lure the singer's fans into theaters (hey, they have to show them something) in order to sell them tickets, popcorn and, eventually, soundtracks.

None of these songbirds has really been required to act — and most of them have lived up to that expectation. The purpose of these forays into film is to showcase a musical performer in a dramatic setting that doesn't force her to do much more than be herself on camera.

In "Crossroads," Spears, the reigning plastic princess of pop and Pepsi, plays Lucy, a recent high school grad in a small Georgia town (where, oddly enough, no one speaks with an accent). As class valedictorian, she's not only smart — she's a goody-goody as well, a virgin who has spent her entire high school career hitting the books under the demanding eye of her divorced father.

"I never went to one football game," she says unhappily on graduation night to her father, who is played by a chagrined Dan Aykroyd (somewhere in heaven, John Belushi is howling with laughter).

So, at this crossroads in her life (Get it? Get it?), she does something wild and irresponsible: She gets into a car with an ex-con she hardly knows (along with her two best friends) because he's offering them a free ride to California. And, because this is a movie aimed at 8-to-13-year-old girls, he turns out to be a good guy.

Each of the three girls has a mission for the trip, so that seems to make it OK. Lucy wants to find the mother she never knew, Kit (Zoe Saldana), the homecoming queen, wants to see her fiance, and Mimi (Taryn Manning), who is five-months pregnant, has to decide whether to keep her baby or give it up for adoption.

Let's see: the valedictorian, the homecoming queen and the slut. Yes, they've touched all the bases.

In the end, they learn this lesson: You have to be true to your heart and follow your dreams. Apparently, screenwriter Shondi Rhimes was a philosophy major.

Before the film is over, Lucy gets to loosen up and lose her virginity — hey, she's not that innocent. Spears gets to prance around in her underwear, and also sing a couple of tunes, doing to Joan Jett's "I Love Rock 'n' Roll" what she did to the Rolling Stones' "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction": eliminate any actual trace of rock 'n' roll.

"Crossroads" isn't a terrible film, just a dreadfully prefabricated one. It's designed to play directly to Spears' key demographic, which will outgrow Spears' music by the time her next album comes out.

"I'm not a girl," she sings in the film's finale, in a song whose next line should be, "I'm a commodity."

Rated PG-13 for profanity, violence, sex