SPRING BREAKERS (18, 94 mins) ** Drama/Thriller/Action. James Franco, Selena Gomez, Vanessa Hudgens, Ashley Benson, Rachel Korine, Gucci Mane, Heather Morris. Director: Harmony Korine.

This off-kilter tale of crime and punishment is as close as writer-director Harmony Korine has ever come to traditional storytelling, populating his cast with teen idols Selena Gomez and Vanessa Hudgens, who smash their wholesome images to smithereens by snorting drugs and pointing guns at innocent bystanders.

If there is a subtext, it’s lost amid the miasma of bouncing breasts, debauchery and endlessly repeated dialogue – “This can’t be the end of the dream” – that hints at the corruption of modern youth.

Good girl Faith (Gomez) attends religious instruction and turns her prayers to Heaven like the rest of her flock.

She returns to her reckless childhood friends Brit (Benson), Candy (Hudgens) and Cotty (Korine), who are looking forward to the spring break, except they don’t have the money to pay for their dream getaway.

So the girls hold up their local Chicken Shack fast food restaurant and use the ill-gotten gains to finance their trip to sun-kissed Florida.

The dream turns sour when they are arrested at a rowdy house party and sleazy drug-dealer Alien (Franco), sporting corn rows and metal teeth, bails them out.

While Brit, Candy and Cotty are content to become Alien’s gun-toting fan club, Faith is scared of their self-anointed saviour and heads back home to say ten Hail Marys.

Meanwhile, Alien welcomes the girls into his gaudy world of excess, serenading them around his piano with a rendition of the Britney Spears ballad Everytime that provides the film with just one moment of hallucinogenic madness.

Spring Breakers begins as a desecration of the rose-tinted portraits of adolescence peddled by most Hollywood teen comedies, but quickly descends into a pointless repetition of images and vapid dialogue.

The hold-up of the Chicken Shack is the film’s stand-out sequence, shot from the vantage point of the getaway driver encircling the restaurant.

In stark contrast, the climactic shootout, conducted in skimpy bikinis and lurid pink ski masks, is a swig of insanity too far.