Metacritic reviews

A playful, punchy tale that spills the beans about those Babies. Zach Galafianakis’ tantrum-prone tycoon transfixes.

The movie is more nuanced than I anticipated and while it doesn’t completely get into the psychology of why, as Robbie puts it, America lost its mind over Beanie Babies, it is a cuddly, enjoyable and often humorous edition of the American dream gone awry.

It’s marked by a polished balance of humor, searing emotion, all the information about the toy business you’d ever want to know, and cautionary advice concerning investments in something silly like stuffed animals — or, by extension, NFTs.

The Beanie Bubble may be a tad conventional in its approach to this “origin story” and its “rise and fall” narrative arc. But it’s a fun, infuriating trip down memory lane thanks to the people traditionally left out of this “story,” the women who made it happen for the guy who got all the credit.

It proves more interesting in its chronicling of the business practices that made the Beanie Babies such a sensation, at least for a while, than in its portrait of personal dramas, the veracity of which obviously has to be called into question. Overall, the movie follows a by-now familiar trajectory, with the company’s mammoth success inevitably followed by its big fall.

Tonally, the movie walks a tricky line between easy-target satire and female-empowering corporate case study, falling into the overcrowded junk-culture nostalgia-porn category so recently represented by “Tetris,” “Air,” “BlackBerry” and “Flamin’ Hot.”

Even with its faults, The Beanie Bubble isn't a bad way to kill some time. All four leads remain gleefully committed to their roles and bring the kind of energy that the screenplay is lacking, but it never fully justifies why this story needed to be told in this way.

Despite building their adaptation around the cyclical predictability of American capitalism, Gore and Kulash can’t help but twist history’s biggest toy craze into a hollow and half-invented corporate fantasy about three women who bought low, sold high, and reinvested all the profits in themselves. If only it were that easy.

Some deeply muddled non-storytelling and tonal blandness pretty much sink this movie from the outset, despite its decent cast and origins in a potentially fascinating true story.

A frustratingly inert film in every way, The Beanie Bubble has no POV and nothing to say.