Bratz, based off the wildly popular line of dolls, is actually a much more tolerable film than the one I was expecting to be greeted with. Rather than a shallow, frothy, candy-colored stroll through ditzy women, inappropriate fashion, and immature circumstances, I received a mildly-entertaining, high-energy romp filled with attractive leads, all of whom at least carry their part with some semblance of conviction, acceptable, if scatter-plotted themes and ideas, and a pleasantly fun diversion through the world that sort of mimics our reality but still finds itself wholly trapped in cinema's, family-friendly kind of reality.
Make no mistake, Bratz isn't really a good film and it wouldn't be the first thing I recommend your daughters see. However, for a film that concerns three teen girls who are obsessed with fashion and self-expression, we could've been handed a much more harmful piece of cinema. Even as a male child, I always wondered why so much outrage and hate was directed at Barbie, who predicated herself off of being a good-natured sweetheart, was always the subject of vehement feminist controversy while the Bratz doll-line went under the radar, with their skimpy attire, makeup-heavy faces, and distracting artificiality. You want to talk about giving young girls the false sense of beauty and exercising the gender roles? The Bratz essentially were telling them not to leave the house without a tube-top, eyeliner, and eyeshadow.
Bratz follows four lifelong best-friends - Cloe (Skyler Shaye), Yasmin (Nathalia Ramos), Sasha (Logan Browning), and Jade (Janel Parrish) - as they enter high school with an attitude to keep each other as close as possible. However, they are heavily burdened by the idea that the self-indulgent, wildly narcissistic class president Meredith Baxter Dimly (Chelsea Kane) wants to identify every student by what clique they should belong to, forcing nothing but social segregation in the already ominous halls of high school. Of course, Meredith finds the free-spirited girls disgusting and offsetting to her plan, but finds little to worry after two years of high school.
Yes, by junior year, the lifelong friends have become nothing but faces in crowded hallways to each other, drifting towards their own sort of cliques, falling victim to Meredith's plan to keep all students part of their own little class of people. Cloe becomes invested in soccer, Sasha becomes a gifted and determined cheerleader, Jade embraces her inner-scientist with the chemistry club, and Yasmin sort of watches it all happen, while quietly participating in journalism. Yet the girls are brought together by four colossal, incredulous misunderstands at lunchtime, which reminds them that they have fallen prey to Meredith's system. Upon reuniting the group to prove that they can still be inseparable and devoted to each other, Meredith sets out to destroy the girls by recreating the party she threw for her sweet sixteen, making it even bigger and better, which she hopes will propel herself to the known voice of the school while the four girls wallow in their shame.
I laud Bratz for at least doing what I never thought would be done in one of the most ostensibly shallow teen films of the last decade, which is etch some solid, vital commentary about high school into its material. While many films have addressed the abundance of cliques and groups in high school, Bratz recognizes the problem with it, which is that kids get the idea that they shouldn't be seen with kids of different cliques, which stunts their emotional and mental growth all the more. Yes, Bratz would be better if it didn't make the cliques so overblown and farcical that they tread the line of being part of a high school satire, but its acknowledgment of a real problem in a pleasantly real way is actually heartwarming to say the least.
Then there's the abundance of singing, dancing, and just hanging out these girls do, which is surprisingly fun and enjoyable, given how shallow it sounds. These are teen girls being teen girls, minus the sarcastic and childish lingo utilized on contemporary kids shows like iCarly and Victorious, but also without the biting wit and commentary of something like Mean Girls, one of this particular's decades smartest teen films.
Bratz essentially wants to be a flashier, more stylistically-potent Mean Girls, but its reliance on scenes that are too goofy and ridiculous to be taken seriously and its repetitive nature are what hinder it from living up to what it could be. The visuals are eye-popping, the music is catchy, if existing from the often forgettable subgenre of bubblegum pop that expires quickly, and the four leads are all charming with their smiley charisma and micro-mini fashionista sense, but the film simply has too much going on to really settle on a focus and it bogged down by scenes that are either not funny or heavy-handed in their moralizing. But the fact that there's moralizing in a film called Bratz, taken from the line of dolls that look the way they do, is surprising enough, giving the film much more leverage and likability than I could've ever imagined.
Starring: Skyler Shaye, Nathalia Ramos, Logan Browning, Janel Parrish, and Chelsea Kane. Directed by: Sean McNamara.
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