Review: 'The Beanie Bubble' runs off the rails
With "Barbie" exploding at the box office, the time seems right for "The Beanie Bubble," now streaming on Apple TV+, a movie loosely based on the creation of the beanie babies of the '80s and '90s -- stuffed animals that became collector's items by restricting their production and thus increasing their value as an investment that could yield as much as $600,000.
It's a hell of a story. But you wouldn't know it from this disjointed mess of a movie starring Zach Galifianakis ("The Hangover" trilogy) as Ty Warner, the self-made tycoon who built plush toys into an industry worth $2.5 billion, mostly by exploiting three women who had the real ideas.
With Galifianakis finding stray human impulses in a narcissist who is basically a full-time jerk, and three dynamite actresses -- Elizabeth Banks, Geraldine Viswanathan and "Succession" Emmy favorite Sarah Snook -- as the misused women who ultimately bring him down, "The Beanie Bubble" should have been way funnier and more ferocious than it is.
The buck of blame stops with screenwriter Kristin Gore, the daughter of former Vice President Al Gore, who co-directed with her husband, Damian Kulash Jr., the lead singer of the indie rock band OK Go. Gore and Kulash have never made a feature before and, yikes, it shows.
Their literary source material is a terrific book, Zac Bissonnette's "The Great Beanie Baby Bubble: Mass Delusion and the Dark Side of Cute," which Gore and Kulash break up into fragmented puzzle pieces that never cohere into a movie that knows where it's going.
What's true? The film begins with a title card that says, "There are parts of the truth that you can't make up. The rest, we did." Translation: We're on our own. The facts bear out that the Chicago-born Ty had a tough time with his mother, diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic, and a strained relationship with his abusive salesman father, whose girlfriends Ty liked to seduce.
Still, it was a bequest from his late dad that allowed Ty to start his own company and sell stuffed toy cats. Galifianakis emphasizes Ty's eccentricities, including his addiction to plastic surgery, bad hairpieces, swilling chocolate milk and running away from emotional commitment.
It's Robbie Jones -- Banks at her spikiest -- who futilely attempts to change the commitment part.
"This story is not about him -- it's about us," says Robbie, on the run from her disabled husband and eager to go global with the business of Ty, Inc., starting in the U.K. Ty resists, resenting input from women as we see him develop into a toxic, sexist Willy Wonka.
Ty applies the same resistance to Maya Kumar (the sensational Viswanathan), the medical student he hires as an intern. He pays her a paltry $17 an hour as she transforms Ty Inc. into a worldwide phenom with internet marketing that drives up the cost of the beanie babies to become (sorry, Barbie) the biggest doll craze in history.
Ty's human side, such as it is, manifests during the Bill Clinton era when he meets divorced mom Sheila Harper, played with warmth and forged steel by Snook. He woos her with a rollerblade dance to "Oh Sheila" and delights her two daughters, who reward him with the idea to make smaller beanie babies that can fit inside a kid's backpack. Of course, Ty screws them over.
You can thank me for straightening out the chronology of a movie that keeps skipping back and forth in time until you want to scream "Make it stop!" Still, even when "The Beanie Bubble" runs off the rails, the actors are bright spots that actually do illuminate the dark side of cute.
By the end of the '90s, the beanie bubble had burst, capped by Ty's 2014 sentence of two years probation for tax evasion. Great story. Lousy execution.
"The Beanie Bubble" is a botch job of failed intentions that tries to pass itself off as a real investigation into the art of the con. No sale.
