Britney para Sempre

The movie was all over the place. The script seemed like it was written in a weekend. It never felt like a movie about the life of Britney Spears. The acting was just horrible. The casting was all wrong. The guy playing Justin Timberlake! Why?! I'm a 56 year old African American woman and would have been better cast to play Britney than Miss Bassett!

"Britney Ever After" (2017 release; 90 min.) is a bio-pic of Britney Spears which premiered this weekend on Lifetime TV. As the movie opens, we are in 2008 and Britney is being interviewed in connection with her comeback. We then go back to "Florida 1998" when Britney is about to embark on her first tour, opening for *NSYNC. Britney soon reconnects with childhood friend Justin Timberlake and soon the two become an item. Meanwhile her mom and dad can't stop arguing about the smallest thing. At this point we are 15 min into the movie but to tell you more would spoil your viewing experience, you'll just have to see for yourself how it all plays out.

Couple of comments: first, this is an unauthorized bio-pic, made without any blessing or cooperation from the Britney camp. In and of itself this shouldn't stop the movie makers from putting together an interesting movie. Alas, they didn't. The movie heavily focuses on the Britney-Justin romance (taking more than a third of the movie), and then rushes through the rest of the material. The quickie Vegas wedding and subsequent dissolution is literally dealt with in a minute or so. Career highlights (such as VMA 2000) and lowlights (VMA 2007) flash by in no time. Worst of all is that there simply is no depth in any of the main characters, it all just happens. Not helping matters is that the movie producers don't have any original Britney music in the film, so the only and few performances we get are covers Britney did in her career (including the Stones' Satisfaction and Joan Jett's I Love Rock n Roll). All the other music is Britney-reminding club music. Natasha Bassett, the Australian actress playing Britney, does the best she can with the material given to here, but she can't save the movie from its strictly by-the-numbers feel (Bassett does the actual singing of the 2 covers mentioned earlier). Please note that, other than the very last minute of the movie, nothing beyond 2008 is covered.

As a Britney fan from the early days on, I was simply curious about this movie, and went into it without a lot of expectations. Even those low expectations weren't met. Given the tumultuous ups and downs Britney has had over the years, surely there is a great movie to be made one day about it all. Alas, "Britney Ever After" is not that movie. If you are a Britney fan, you will learn nothing new that you didn't know before. Viewer beware.

Initially from the opening shots it felt like I was watching an SNL version of Britney's life ..From the cooky vibe, to the tacky accent to the overly hyped up 9 year old silly girl performance of the lead, I knew I was watching a joke and a disaster, but I was curious.

The girl has 0 sex appeal nor conviction nor even physical attractiveness (with all due respect to her off course) but its insulting to one the biggest pop icons in the world who's known for being sexy, sultry and physically perfect.

I assumed they could not use the real music for copy right infringement issues that could result in a law suit, and that is what happens when you make a movie about someone whose life is not even half way through being lived and does not approve of the story. That affected the story GREATLY ! Not a single Britney song lol

There are levels of bad, and I came into this with poor expectations, but it surprised me just how truly horrid it was, the acting the direction, the story layout, above all the lead, and everything in between. The amateurish direction, the poor production values and the terrible cast truly destroyed a powerful story into a messy, clichéd film.

An opportunity to recreate greatness and capture vulnerability, iconic moments of real life, style and inspiration missed.

Final Grade F-

Terribly innacurate storyline, awful acting, and the caracters doesn't look like the real ones not even by far. Actually to be fair, the girl playing Britney does look a little bit like her when she smiles, and she does try hard to look like her, but she hardly gets close to it. I understand they can't use her music to it, but could at least create songs close to her style than the crap they came up with. And could dig deeper in the stories insteat of all those superficial happenings. Cleary the person who wrote it doesn't know Britney at all. Why haven't they asked a fan to write it? It definitely would be much better. Well...there goes 1 hour of my life which i'll never get back!

STAR RATING: ***** Saturday Night **** Friday Night *** Friday Morning ** Sunday Night * Monday Morning

A made for TV biopic of the pop icon Britney Spears (Natasha Bassett), from starting out with her breakthrough single Baby One More Time in 1999, where she was shoved into the limelight by her pushy mother Lynne (Nicole Oliver) and domineering manager Larry Rudolph (Peter Benson), who both naively thought she was old and mature enough to handle such massive media exposure and pushed her to lie about her virginity to keep up an illusion, through to the trials and turbulence of her relationships with Justin Timberlake (Nathan Keyes) and Kevin Federline (Clayton Chitty), before a revealing 2008 documentary aired.

Sometimes, something can give you a really bad vibe, yet you still feel utterly compelled to see it. Your instinct can tell you it looks really bad, and you can see no end of bad reviews, and you can almost write a review before you've even seen it, but still you're still interested in the subject matter and you just have to see it yourself. While I've never been a massive fan of her music, something about Britney Spears has always captivated me and kept my attention, being such an icon of popular culture as she is. For all this, though, I've never gotten the feeling she was comfortable with this status, and so a dramatisation of her life, as inevitable as it was, was never something I thought she'd be happy about (and, from what's been said, that's definitely the case with this.)

Such a popular name is Britney, that a big studio could quite willingly have thrown its clout behind a production of her life, so why this no budget monstrosity is even in existence is ripe for question. And what little budget it must have had, as the terrible production values are in evidence from the opening credits, and from there, like a crashing plane whirling down from the sky, it just becomes an even bigger amateurish, terribly made mess. Lead star Bassett looks, and pretty much sounds, nothing like the real Britney, and her portrayal of her is just excruciating, as is Nathan Keyes's cringe-worthy performance as first love Justin. You never get the feeling you're watching a real life unfolding, just a corny, overblown childish imagining.

This is just the typical sort of thing you see on the Hallmark Channel/True Entertainment, only the worst kind of example, and one which you can really see from the outset and just trust your instincts on. NO STARS.