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. It might have been served better as a documentary, and right from the off, this feature film deploys the deeply annoying and all-too familiar get-out clause of pre-emptively giggling that it is kind of false and sort of not, flashing up the statement after the opening credits: “There are parts of the truth you can’t make up. The rest we did.”
It is adapted by Kristin Gore from Zac Bissonnette’s nonfiction study The Great Beanie Baby Bubble: Mass Delusion and the Dark Side of Cute, and directed by Gore and Damian Kulash; it tackles the little-known human drama behind the US’s bizarre “Beanie Baby bubble” tulip-style craze of the 1990s, in which an unofficial collectors’ market in limited edition lines of the cutesy Beanie Baby plush toys, driven by word-of-mouth and the fledgling eBay website, escalated prices to insane levels.
