Take an expired cultural obsession or briefly profitable fad, dig around for what made it boom, and/or bust, give it a slick spin and day-glo visuals, and you’re off to the races. In theory.
The Beanie Bubble – it’s about Beanie Babies, a line of plush animal toys for which the world went nuts in the 1990s – posits them as the NFTs of their day. The film wants to hook everyone’s inner entrepreneur on the drama of locating a goldmine: a money-spinner buoyed by the collectors’ market, and therefore vulnerable to collapse though oversaturation, which is precisely what happened.
It presents this company’s founder, self-made billionaire Ty Warner (Zach Galifianakis) as a man simply too stupid, or greedy, to grasp the nature of his own business. The film has the dishonesty to claim that it’s not really telling Warner’s story – but that of three women he screwed over in the process, each finding ways to pull clear and get their own back. The way this script presents it, his consecutive girlfriends Robbie (Elizabeth Banks) and Sheila (Sarah Snook) were awfully slow to grasp the man’s childish narcissism, bedazzled by a combination of superficial charm and all the money he was making.
Meanwhile, a sociology grad called Maya (Geraldine Viswanathan) becomes an early whiz at online data mining, gilding the company’s fortunes by following sales patterns on eBay, while being paid $12 an hour. One by one, this trio wake up to being taken for a ride, and the film stretches all credulity by giving them, in tandem, bog-standard #Girlboss redemption arcs to leave each one sitting pretty.
The shaping of the story is both fraudulent and finicky – jerry-rigging twists by juggling timelines, like a Poundland knock-off Christopher Nolan. It’s not as though Banks, Snook and the reliably charming Viswanathan don’t have their moments, but the film commits to a relentless hard sell on the Amazing Women™ each one is playing, and we don’t really believe a word.
