The Beanie Bubble
Cert: 15 | ★★★✩✩

First there was Air, a film about an iconic sports shoe. Then came Tetris, a biopic outlining the genesis of a Cold War-era Soviet computer game.

And now we have a feature about the Beanie Baby craze of the late 20th century. Should the trend of the brand biopic continue, what possible subject will we be treated to next?

Co-directed by Damian Kulash and Kristin Gore — daughter of former presidential candidate Al Gore —The Beanie Bubble asks: why did the world suddenly treat stuffed animals like gold dust?

It’s a good question, but the answer is as fluffy as the toy animals that sold for thousands of dollars each.

In the film, popular comedy actor Zach Galifianakis stars as Ty Warner, a frustrated toy salesman whose collaboration with three women — played by Elizabeth Banks, Sarah Snooks and Geraldine Viswana — turns his humble business into a multimillion conglomerate overnight.

The film does a fairly decent job of revealing the behind-the-scenes machinations of this once hugely successful business with panache and a degree of campy effervescence.

Beanie Bubble Photo 0108

Sarah Snook (Photo: Apple)

Leaning a little too heavily perhaps on the “behind every great man” wisdom, Gore and Kulash present a perfectly serviceable story about women’s role in business.

But in the end, and perhaps inadvertently, it’s Galifianakis’ Warner who gets all the best lines.

And if this film was meant to make us hate Warner, I’m afraid to say that casting Galifianakis in the role has had the absolute opposite effect.

As awful and as completely out of his depth as he might have been, there is something about Ty Warner that made him the poster child for the toy-manufacturing industry in the Eighties and Nineties and this should be addressed, ideally critically. Instead, the film feels likes it simply cheerleading late 20th- century capitalism.

So while there are some decent performances all around, in the end — and I’m being brutally honest here — I just found it very hard to get even slightly excited over a stuffed toy manufacturer who suffered from delusions of grandeur.

‘The Beanie Bubble’ is available to stream on Apple TV.