Review: The derivative Bratz is a great big pink marshmallow of a movie, aimed at one demographic only: tween girls into fashion and lip gloss. Anyone else, enter at your own risk.
Bratz is Mean Girls meets High School Musical meets whatever other high school teen scenario you can think of.
Here, four teenage girls make up the Bratz. There's Yasmin (Nathalia Ramos), a quiet Latina girl with a great voice; Sasha (Logan Browning), the outgoing black cheerleader who loves to dance; Jade (Janel Parrish), an Asian fashionista who also a chemistry genius; and Cloe (Skyler Shayne), the tall Caucasian blonde, who, despite being a bimbo, is a star on the soccer field.
They've been best friends forever (or BFF, as they lovingly refer to it), but once they hit high school, they drift apart and into respective cliques, organized by the narcissistic class president Meredith (Cheslea Staub). Still, these BFF's won't be pushed down. They're gonna shake things up and prove it's always best to just be yourself and stick together.
You can't really blame the unknown girls for wanting to bring the Bratz dolls to life. It's a big deal! They get to sing and dance and wear all these cool clothes! They get to throw food in a cafeteria lunch fight! They get to serve sweets at Meredith's Sweet 16 party dressed as clowns and still look fabulous! All the young girls in the audience will idolize them and wish they were a Brat, too (much to their parents' chagrin). No, it's the adults in the movie you have to scratch your head about and ask, "Do they really need the money that bad?" Character actors such as Lainie Kazan, who plays Yasmin's wise grandmother, and Jon Voight, as the inept high school head and Meredith's father, just embarrass themselves over and over again.
And what's with this latest trend to make live-action flicks based on toys? You can understand Transformers because they already had their own cartoon show, and you know the movie would at least be action-packed, full of cool visual effects. But a Bratz movie is a little too much. Even though it tries really hard to send positive messages, there's really nothing redeeming about turning little dolls into flesh-and-blood teenagers, obsessed with how they look.
Bratz really only distinguishes itself from other Mean Girls-type movies because of the toy franchise.
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