The five Spice Girls—Mel C, Mel B, Emma, Victoria, Geri—are under stress because their manager Clifford is pushing them to constantly perform, without any break to relax. They have a huge concert planned at the Royal Albert Hall. A tabloid editor is bored of only good news from the Spice Girls and thus hires a paparazzi to find "dirt" on the girls in order to sell bad news about them in his newspaper. The girls get into an argument with Clifford and disappear. They help their friend, Nicola, deliver a baby and rush in a bus to their concert at Albert Hall. Two film producers pitch a movie idea about Spice Girls to Clifford.
During the 'peak' Spice Girls era, when the band already became one of the icons of the 90s, a decision was delivered to make this movie as some sort of a vehicle to promote them even more, in the vein of "A Hard Days Night" or "ABBA: The Movie". However, unlike the said two movies, "Spice World" is not that fun, or creative or as inspired as it could have been, though it is still a solid fun. The movie works the best in the first 30 minutes, when the five girls manage to conjure up some charm, but it loses its steam later on, when it gets lost in the sea of random, unconnected episodes chaotically scattered throughout (a drill Sargent; aliens demanding an autograph; Roger Moore feeding a little pig with a milk bottle). The five girls act too often like a collective, and thus, sadly, we do not find out much about their individual characters on their own, which makes them less than the "sum of their parts", yet there are still a few good jokes in the film. In one charming moment, the five girls wake up in the middle of the night in a castle, and recount their nightmares—and when it is Victoria's turn, she goes: "I had the exactly same dream, but mine was much, much worse. You see, I had a head... but there was no make up on it". In another good joke, an associate informs the villain, the slimy tabloid editor who wants to find bad news about the Spice Girls, that the girls may not perform at their biggest scheduled concert. The bad guy then stands up from his chair in a strange expression and has this exchange: "Something strange is happening... What is it? Something is happening to my face!" - "You're smiling." There are also some traces of magic, of joie de vivre in the sequence where the girls perform "Wannabe" from start to finish in an empty pub, just for the owner who is their only audience member. "Spice World" is a 'guilty pleasure': it could have been better, but has some inexplicable charm to it. It is actually a pity there was never a second Spice Girls film, since one gets the impression there is more to this girls than just what was shown here.
Grade:+
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