Film Reviews

Bratz: The Movie

• Rating:
• Director: Sean McNamara
• Starring: Janel Parrish
• Details: US / 110 mins (G)

For the first time ever, I feel like an old fogey reviewing a movie; I'm that dweeb from the restaurant in Ferris Bueller's Day Off who looks at the kids with scorn and says: "I weep for the future." I hate Bratz for that, but hate it more for what it's teaching pre-teens. Sure, they try and dress up its message that having best friends is more important than being in cliques, but it's see-through and doesn't leave a lot to the imagination. What Bratz will tell girls aged 8-12 is that the most important thing and the best you can hope for in life is being attractive and trendy. Four attractive, trendy and ethnically diverse teenage girls - Sasha (Browning), Jade (Parrish), Yasmin (Ramos) and Cloe (Shaye) - enter high school determined to be BFF (Best Friends Forever). However, they are dumped into different cliques and soon drift apart. Two years later, after a food fight in the canteen, the girls find themselves in detention, ignite their flagging friendship and band together to take down queen bitch of the universe - the attractive and trendy Meredith (Chelsea Staub), planning an MTV-style Sweet Sixteen birthday party. In past years, it was the vacuous, superficial girls that were the enemies in high school comedies; Bratz turns the stereotype on its head and not in a clever way. This is the flipside of those Simpsons episodes that saw Lisa battle the Malibu Stacey corporation for dumbing down their dolls into twittering idiots, when the new girl sauntered into school with her make up, flash clothes, mobile phone and credit card. The phoniness of this culture is not parodied but celebrated, and Paris Hilton is someone to aspire to. It will argue that it holds a mirror up to this culture, but it likes what it sees.

Review by Gavin Burke