Life in plastic, it’s (not) fantastic.

When I was young, girls and boys played with dolls. Things like Barbie in the case of girls; Action Man, in the case of boys. I could never understand how it was that the boys I hung out with didn’t get that they were playing with a doll. I hated those days when footballs and cricket bats were rejected in favour of Action Man and Thunderbird machines. It wasn’t the effeminacy of the activity that offended my sensibilities, and I forgave them their obsession with other-worldly fantasy as something that turned them on, if not me. What I objected to about that form of playing was that the doll, or flying machine, had no autonomy. It only did what you did to it. Idiot friends in your social circle would suddenly come to the fore, “Right, I bring my landing craft over to where you’re standing – ch-ch-ch-ch-ch whoosh. Nnnneeeow!”

I didn’t relish the prospect of watching a film about these dolls, I must admit, but at least they were to be given voice and will – we were to see them as they really are (you know, when children aren’t directing their actions). And besides, the early reviews were stellar, and they all sought to emphasise the appeal of the film to adults with a sense of humour.

You might be better off reading them. I really don’t want to be one of those ridiculous men who have become a meme for giving it a 1 star rating, and I hope I can differentiate myself from them when I say, I thought it was pathetic.

The positive views seem to centre around the idea that the film affirms the joy of Barbie whilst at the same time putting valid criticisms of the Barbie project under the microscope: objectivization of women; cynical commercial exploitation of an idea which promotes women as creatures of limited options. Mattel, who will likely see a spike in sales on the back of the film, and whose cooperation was needed to make it, are commended as good sports by the critics, who also denounce what they did in decades past with their best-selling product. What’s not to like? It’s a box-ticking delight. Not only that, but the filmmakers have sprinkled in lovely little jokes and clever observations that straddle both camps… so say the proselytes.

Well, this. All shoe-horned into the lamest of a too-often seen three-act structure, this film is entirely derivative from start to finish. Derivative? Plagiaristic might be a better word. What would have been the best bits 10-20 years ago, were entirely ‘borrowed’ – let’s say that, from Elf, The Hudsucker Proxy, Zoolander, Toy Story, and the Me-Too films of recent years. It was a boring cliché of a film that didn’t so much pluck the low hanging fruit to make its observations about empowerment, enablement, and male entitlement, as pick up the rotting fruit from the ground.

Go and see it if you must, but it’s a yawn-fest of a cliché. And yet, that’s not the bad thing about it. All of the above is boring but bearable. What makes this film so excruciating that it made me want to ram knitting needles into my ears, was the sound track. There was an opening scene that was supposed to put the whole female-doll fascination thing into perspective, over which the opening credits ran. Ten minutes later, the agonisingly awful 80s disco-electro-white rock thing was still playing, too loudly, over credits that were arriving onto the screen with the tempo of Chinese water torture. That music, in which Mark Ronson had a hand, did not just play throughout the movie, it was a feature of it, as if it somehow summed up the Barbie heyday. There were montage scenes and dance scenes that went on endlessly, when this dreadful noise came out of the shadows, from where it had been buzzing like tinnitus, into the foreground, seemingly designed to coerce all but the most devoted adherents into confessing that, “Yes, I am not a true believer. I’m a phony. I only played with her until Boxing Day.”

Add to that the ceaseless shiny pinkness of it all. It was like Clockwork Orange aversion therapy for anyone who’d ever been duped into playing with dolls. For those of us that did not need curing, it felt like gratuitous torture, inflicted on us by our cultural enemies.

Begge out.

*many thanks to Silver Ringvee for the broken dolls image.