I often see people dismiss movies like Bratz as harmless entertainment for the kiddies. But please stop and think for a second about the image of America's youth such a film sends out to the rest of the world. Although I may be a bit alarmist, I'm close to thinking Bratz could end up being at least partially responsible for the stupefication of America's young ones. Also, it's a flat-out awful movie, one of the absolute worst of this year or any year, for that matter.

Based upon a popular line of children's dolls, Bratz centers around four spunky teen girls: Yasmin (Nathalia Ramos), Sasha (Logan Browning), Cloe (Skyler Shaye), and Jade (Janel Parrish). The best of friends, even this tight-knit quartet can't help being scattered throughout the social hierarchy when they take their first steps through the hallowed halls of high school as freshmen. The order of cliques, maintained and organized by the conniving Meredith (Chelsea Staub), manages to keep the girls separated until their junior year, at which point they realize enough is enough and that Meredith's reign of social terror has to end. Together again, the girls go about trying to integrate the cliques with one another, breaking down barriers in the name of not being defined by your interests but by the person you are.

Bratz isn't your run-of-the-mill goofy kids movie. The way it puts itself up on a pedestal, thinking it's a world-changing social experiment rather than a feature aimed straight at the High School Musical crowd, clearly indicates this is not only a very dumb film, but it's also incredibly full of itself. Despite what were probably the best of intentions, Bratz ends up making an awful lot of generalizations for a flick encouraging individuality. The clique-defying heroines are themselves their own self-contained little group whose entire lives revolve around what to wear next; the girls aren't too far from being like Meredith, the only difference is Meredith's outright evil intentions. 

The individual Bratz are nothing more than four tired stereotypes thrown together: Sasha is the sassy black girl, Cloe is the ditzy blonde, Yasmin is the Latina girl whose family inexplicably has a mariachi band randomly hanging out in the kitchen, and Jade is the smart Asian girl, with a mother so painfully cliched you expect someone to follow her around with a gong. Bratz starts off wanting to destroy harsh generalizations and ends up keeping them alive and well.

But even on the simplest of levels, without any thought or analysis involved, Bratz still comes across as one of the worst movies I've ever seen. Maybe it wouldn't have been so ghastly if it were shorter, but for some blasted reason, this nauseatingly cutesy, bubblegum package lasts almost two hours. An hour and a half of giggling teenage girls is hard enough to stand, but when another twenty minutes of the plot hinges on such things as baking enough cupcakes and a slightly embarassing video, Bratz becomes the cinematic equivalent of Chinese water torture. This  movie suffers from a misguided sense of dramatic tension and offers one painful musical number too many as well as scenes of poor Jon Voight making an utter fool out of himself. 

If Bratz is correct in its depiction of one student having free reign to decide who sits with whom and at which lunch table, our educational system needs a lot more than four teeny-boppers with their parents' credit cards to help fix it.

MY RATING: no stars (out of ****)

(Released by Lionsgate; not rated by MPAA.)