Film review - Spice World: The Movie (1997)

Cast your mind back to the summer of 1996: with the news dominated by the Atlanta Olympics and the intensity surrounding parades back home, pop music was suddenly taken over by a five-piece girl band known as the Spice Girls.   Ushering in a phenomenon branded 'girl power', the group owned a void not even remotely seen since Bananarama and literally turned the volume right up.

It's no exaggeration to use the saying about one's rising fame that "they were everywhere".  Every television show with a young demographic wanted them; virtually every magazine and occasionally newspaper would have them on the front page; their music saturated the pop radio stations.  They would see out '96 with the first of three consecutive Christmas UK No.1 singles - a feat only accomplished at that point by The Beatles three decades previously.

By the end of the year they completely dominated the UK's airwaves.  Within the next 12 months they took the world by storm; so much so that they unsurprisingly took the natural venture on to the silver screen .... albeit with awful results.  Seriously.  The magic of their marketing, which had also ranged from t-shirts to dolls, was now being attempted at the cinematic box office - the output resulting in a glorified infomercial for undeniably the most successful popular music act of the 90s.

The plot basically takes a fictionalised view of the group's day-to-day lives made up of rehearsing, performing, socialising and liasing with apparent antagonists like newspaper editors, photographers and their own manager.  Cameos came from showbiz royalty - including Barry Humphries, Meat Loaf, Roger Moore and Alan Cumming - in a desperate attempt to flesh out something of a story, with poor Richard E Grant assigned the main task of conjuring up the proverbial chicken salad out of the movie.  The real star however is the Brexit-like double-decker bus that shows more depth and dimension than any of the girl's acting skills.

This was nothing more than a cash-in on their status at the time.  Their second album, also conveniently entitled 'Spice World', was essentially the soundtrack along with some of their big hits from their surperior first collection of tunes, 'Spice'.  Natural comparisons were made to Liverpool's aforementioned Fab Four, however this was the Spice Girls' sole feature film.  John, Paul, Ringo and George on the other hand technically made five, starting with 'A Hard Day's Night' (1964), created with a coherent plot structure and under Richard Lester's ('Superman II and III') tight direction.

It could be argued that it would've been daft not to even attempt making a Spice Girls film, certainly at the height and possibly the peak of their collective fame (It made bank and recouped over five times its budget).  That said, upon re-viewing over twenty years later, it serves as a pretentious post card from a bygone era.  Pop this in the time capsule if you dare!  A curiosity it remains and nothing more.