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Written by Roger Moore, MCT
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Monday, 30 July 2007 |
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BRATZ: THE MOVIE
2 stars (out of 5)
Cast: Nathalia Ramos, Janel Parrish, Logan Browning, Skyler Shaye, Jon Voight
Director: Sean McNamara
Running time: 1 hour, 37 minutes
Industry rating: PG
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"Bratz," a live-action movie based on a set of dolls who have also inspired assorted animated direct-to-video releases, isn't all that. With those bubble-gum origins, it never was going to be much.
But OMG! For a formulaic comedy about shallow, shopping-obsessed teenagers, it's about twice as good as it has any right to be. The four bratty fashion plates are distinct characters. They have personal issues to overcome - stage fright, working-class money problems, suffocating parental expectations, egoism.
And their cause upon hitting their high school is to remain friends in the face of ruthless and ruthlessly-enforced cliqueshness. BFF, you know.
Best of all, there's a food fight! LOL!
"Raise Your Voice"/"That's So Raven"/"Even Stevens" vet Sean McNamara keeps the over-familiar plot lines in the background, focusing on characters. He's particularly enamored of the Brat-nemesis, Meredith, the most popular, most talented girl at Carrie Nation High. (Hah!)
Meredith is a Reese Witherspoon meanie vamped up by Chelsea Staub. She's in control, putting everyone in his or her proper clique - goths, geeks, nerds, jocks, disco dorks, etc. She dominates the annual talent show with her big-production-number pop performances, songs about "me," being jealous of "me," hating on "me," resenting "my" talent.
Until, that is, the girls she labels "Bratz" show up.
When the four friends Cloe, Sasha, Yasmin and Jade drop into their new school, they instantly stir up trouble. Their "passion for fashion" sets them apart.
"I love the smell of retail in the morning!"
But then the klutzy Cloe (Skyler Shay) falls in with the soccer jocks, the brainy Jade (Janel Parrish) becomes the idol of the math, science and home ec geeks and Sasha (Logan Browning) rocks the cheer squad. That leaves the shy singer Yasmin (Nathalia Ramos) as the odd girl out. She's on her own for two years, until her friends remember the second "F" in "BFF" (best friends forever).
It's a school of perfectly beautiful kids, from the deaf boy that Yasmin insults and then falls for (Ian Nelson, lousy at playing deaf) to the hunky jock Cameron (Stephan Lunsford). Jon Voight is oddly and almost unrecognizably cast as the principal, Meredith's doting daddy.
And Lainie Kazan, who has played convincing Greeks, Jewish mamas and Italians, finally finds an ethnicity she can't master as Yasmin's Latina granny. She butchers "La Cucaracha" and every Spanish term of endearment that comes out of her mouth.
But aside from the "shop shop shop" consumerism of the girls, "Bratz" is endearingly tame and harmless. It's a perfectly acceptable transition film for little girls just aging out of dolls and cartoons and into their own "passion for fashion."
They grow up so fast, from "My Little Pony" to clothes horse, in an instant. You just hope they make a few BFFs along the way.
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