Sunday, September 15, 2024

Crossroads (2002)


A reputation can follow someone or something for a long time. That reputation could be based in some sort of reality, or it could have been blown out of proportion. Whatever the case, that’s how people see that person or thing. They see it with that reputation until they actually get to know that person or thing. Only experience can break a reputation. If you spend time with someone or something, it doesn’t matter what their reputation is. You have your own feelings that will affect how you feel about them.

Reputation can be a major influence on people’s opinions of movies. There are so many movies and television shows being released on a regular basis that it is impossible to watch them all. There’s just no way someone could do that. Even if a person didn’t sleep and spent all their waking life just watching movie after movie after television episode after episode, there is absolutely no way that person could ever see everything.


That’s where a reputation could come in handy. Critic reviews or word of mouth could influence a person on whether they seek something out. Bad reviews and bad word of mouth could turn them away from something, while glowing reviews and positive word of mouth could lead them to watch something. A reputation that a movie builds up could influence who sees it and when they see it.

However, sometimes a reputation doesn’t do a movie justice. There could be something with glowing reviews that doesn’t quite live up to the high expectations. There could be something that got trashed in the press that enjoyable. There could be a movie, like Crossroads, that gained a reputation as one of the worst movies of all time, but is very okay. It happens. I’m here to tell you that Crossroads isn’t nearly as bad as people might have you think.


Crossroads followed three newly-graduated-from-high-school friends on a cross-country trip from Georgia to Los Angeles, via Tucson. Lucy (Britney Spears) was escaping the overprotective household of her father (Dan Aykroyd) in search of her estranged mother. Kit (Zoe Saldana) was off to meet up with her long-distance boyfriend who seemed to also be distancing himself emotionally. Mimi (Taryn Manning) was a pregnant teenager who wanted to audition for a singing talent show, ala American Idol. They hopped in a car with Ben (Anson Mount), a young man with a mysterious criminal past, and hit the road.

The strength of Crossroads wasn’t in the story. The movie was a fairly standard teenage road trip movie, though less raunchy than counterparts like Eurotrip or Road Trip. A bunch of young adults got into some troubles on the road. But they were always there to bail each other out. An overbearing parent wanted to know where his kid was. He travelled to get his kid back. There was a romance brewing. You know, all the normal beats for this kind of road trip movie. If people were only knocking it for following the same beats as so many other movies, that would be fine. But the reputation of being one of the worst movies of all time says that people’s issues were more than a simple unoriginal story complaint.

The strength of Crossroads also wasn’t in the serious subject matter. I don’t really know where I would fall on the serious stuff that Crossroads had. On one hand, it worked. I think all of the serious stuff was effective. This just maybe wasn’t the movie for it. Lucy found out her mother left because she never wanted a child at that point in her life and the only reason that she wasn’t aborted was that her father wouldn’t let her mother go through with it. That’s a hard-hitting story beat that worked quite well. If it was in another movie. It felt out of place in Crossroads. Same with Kit finding out that her boyfriend raped Mimi at New Year’s, or Mimi falling down the stairs and miscarrying her baby. These things were important to the movie and were effective for what they were. But all three of these serious moments felt out of place when the rest of the movie was so playful.


Now it’s time to get to the strength of Crossroads. The strength of Crossroads was the rekindling of the friendship between Lucy, Kit, and Mimi. The three of them had been friends as children but had fallen out of friendship through their high school years. As the road trip commenced, they reconnected in a way none of them expected. They still cared about each other, even though their lives had gone separate directions. They were at a crossroads in each of their lives and realized that their bond was what was important, not all the other issues they were dealing with.

This friendship showed up in different ways. There was the mystery of Ben’s time in jail. The three of them gossiped about how he murdered someone. They thought he was a killer. They thought they were driving with a killer. It was thrilling and chilling for them. The way they gossiped with each other nailed the friendship aspect.

Most importantly, though, was the music. Crossroads was a movie that starred Britney Spears. It was bound to have her sing at some point. That music was all over the movie. That music was all over the friendship. The three friends would sing as they drove. They would be in the back seat together, belting out to N*Sync (funny because of Britney’s relationship with Justin Timberlake), Shania Twain, or any other song that came on. They got up on stage together at one point to make a little bit of money performing some tunes. Mostly one tune, a cover of I Love Rock ‘n’ Roll. Even the talent show at the end got a Britney Spears performance of I’m Not a Girl, Not Yet a Woman. The music and friendship tied together to be the driving force of the movie. It was the main strength of Crossroads. It was what, in my opinion, kept the movie from being one of the worst of all time. This stuff was actually pretty good.


So there you have it. A movie with the reputation of being one of the worst of all time. A movie I watched and realized that the reputation isn’t all that accurate. Was Crossroads a great movie? No. Not at all. Did it have some stuff that could have been done better? For sure. The serious story beats didn’t fit with the tone of the rest of the movie. But did it also do some stuff well? More often than not, yeah, it did. Crossroads was fine. It had the potential to be great and didn’t live up to that, but it was fine. It’s still an entertaining little road trip movie that I might end up seeing again.

A reputation could make the difference between a movie finding an audience or not. A reputation could keep someone from being popular. Reputations precede a person or thing and can be hard to get out from under. But once you get to know someone or something, you can rid yourself of seeing them through that lens. You understand the reality of the situation. A reputation can only hurt before the experience. The reality of the situation is all that remains after. Don’t let a reputation turn you off from someone or something.


Now it’s time for everyone’s favourite part of these posts, the notes:

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