You'll no doubt be stunned to find that there's a lot of thematic conflict at the heart of the new movie/music video "Spice World." And it isn't Posh arguing with Scary about which shoes go best with a black Gucci miniskirt, either. The movie can't decide if it wants to remain a worthless, schmaltzy promotional tool for its stars the Spice Girls, or if it wants to explode from those boundaries and focus a sharp, satirical eye on the ironies and foolishness that being a pop star in the nineties can entail. It ends up winding its way serenely down the middle of the road because, to be successful, it must. Unfortunately, the movie's attempts to simultaneously please hard-core Spice fans and surprise Spice detractors with self-depreciating wit make for a muddled mess.

In its promotion, "Spice World" has been called "a cross between 'A Hard Day's Night' and 'This is Spinal Tap,'" but no one's ever bothered to notice that such a hybrid is next to impossible. Hell, one of the supergroups satirized in "Spinal Tap" is the Beatles themselves. "Spinal Tap" offers unflinching satire of the pomposity and foolishness that has been pervasive in the life of a "pop star" since Elvis Presley. "A Hard Day's Night" is a fun romp with the Beatles through England. To accept the farce of pop stardom as a valid lifestyle is to undermine everything "Spinal Tap" aims to do. When you mix in "A Hard Day's Night," the joke loses its edge and much of its meaning.

This is the problem at the heart of "Spice World": it can't decide whether it wants to be "Spinal Tap" or "A Hard Day's Night." One minute you've got the five Spice Girls lamenting their busy schedule with a straight face, trying so hard to act sincere that their heads must hurt. The next minute, they're slyly spoofing their various "characters" by dressing up as each other for a photo shoot. Style fights substance until the bitter end of "Spice World." I'll tell ya, though: there is a thirty-minute segment near the end of the film that is tightly written and funny as HELL. It's worth seeing "Spice World" just for this segment (and for the SHOES, but that's another article entirely).

Throughout the mish-mash, both the Spice Girls and their various co-stars deliver surprisingly strong performances. Richard E. Grant blusters his way through a turn as the Spice Girls' manager, taking orders from the mysterious Roger Moore, who only speaks in bizarre aphorisms. Moore's character provides some of the strongest laughs in the film, but the Spice Girls themselves don't do such a bad job of coaxing out chuckles themselves. I suppose the easy answer would be to point out that the Spice Girls are playing themselves, so of course they do a great job. But I doubt it's easy to play ANYONE in front of movie cameras in a believable way, and all five Spice Girls seem surprisingly comfortable and endearing in their film debut. Victoria "Posh Spice" Williams does an especially solid job in a series of jokes poking fun at her excessive obsession with style and appearance. The performances alone do a great deal to redeem the film.

Unfortunately, the problems with "Spice World" all come trickling back to the schizophrenic script. It would have taken a lot of courage to follow the satirical elements of this script to their logical ends, and it probably could have been done while preserving some semblance of expectations for the younger fans. At least we can be thankful that the Spice Girls and their screenwriter saw fit to inject the bits of satire and comedy that are in the script. The scraps of comedy tossed to those above the age of 13 in the audience are worth the price of admission, if you can sit through the mammoth chunks of schmaltz and sap.