Zach Galifianakis leads this thin retelling of one of the dumbest speculative bubbles in history.
Utilising his father's wealth, Ty Warner (Zach Galifianakis) convinces next-door neighbour Roberta (Elizabeth Banks) to help him set up a stuffed-toy company that grows into a multi-million business. Along the way, Ty also enlists the help of a motivated young intern (Geraldine Viswanathan) and a romantic partner (Sarah Snook), but it's not before long that Ty's insatiable greed and selfishness begins to get the better of it...
The recent trend of corporate dramas of late has had varying degrees of honesty about their origins. In the case of 'Air', it's effectively a hagiography about Michael Jordan and the Air Jordan. In the case of 'Tetris', it's part Cold War polemic, part comedy-caper. With 'The Beanie Bubble', there's at least a full-throated admission that capitalism is, at its dark and blackened heart, an enterprise built on gutting the person next to you to get ahead. The problem is that the vehicle used to communicate this message is cute and cuddly toys.
Sure, we see Elizabeth Banks curse like a sailor while surrounded by garishly coloured toys, we see Zach Galifianakis play a loveable man-child with Sarah Snook's on-screen kids, but the moments when the bottomless pit of both his soul and corporate America is exposed, it feels completely neutered and softened. If you're going to go to the trouble of making a movie about Beanie Babies - those dumb little toys that people lost their shit over thirty years ago - the least you can do is make it engaging and delve into how it all happened. Instead, Geraldine Visnawathan's character, Maya, is effectively brought in as an exposition dump explaining a speculative bubble in the simplest terms possible, and then later as a Cassandra when she tries to warn anyone and everyone that the bubble is about to burst.
Galifianakis plays the love-bombing businessman well, crafting himself in real time as he gels his hair back in ridiculous styles and adorns himself with power suits at every chance he can get. Banks, meanwhile, is able to play the hard-scrabbling businesswoman with ease. Sarah Snook, who so fully captured the heart in the darkness of 'Succession', is more or less playing a two-dimensional romantic counterpart for Galifianakis' character. While there are some strong performances from the assembled cast, the whole thing just feels far too thin and hollow for it to make an impact.
The famous image of the couple separating Beanie Babies in a courtroom is reduced to a brief mention in a tediously edited montage of the craze surrounding 'The Beanie Bubble' taking shape. There's a constant presence of TVs detailing the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal feels strange when you realise the movie was written and directed by Kristin Gore, daughter of Al Gore - that's Vice President Al Gore, who was bang smack in the middle of said scandal. The structure of the movie also feels needlessly complex for something that isn't really complex at all. Flicking between the late '80s and early '90s by way of a date-ticker and music drops, 'The Beanie Bubble' tries to add layers of intricacy and detail but ultimately winds up losing the thread of the story.
Even when it is eventually woven together, there's a kind of deadened sense of nobody really learning anything from it. All the characters go on to bigger and better things, and speculative bubbles continue to this very day, not to mention the fact that there's a run on these corporate dramas playing out now, including one about the GameStop short squeeze. Much like the bubbles themselves, if you've seen one, you've more or less seen them all.