Dir: Sean McNamara
With: Logan Browning, Janel Parrish, Nathalia Ramos, Skyler Shaye, Jon Voight

Fancy spending a couple of hours in the company of squealing teenage girls? High-pitched, highly strung teenagers who, like, talk in that funny question mark language?

You know, they phrase every sentence like it's an enquiry? And they say "Oh, my, God" a really, really lot?

Oh my God, indeed. I wanted to care about the travails of Sasha, Jade, Yasmin and Cloe - all characters based on the original Bratz dolls - as they adapted to the pressure-cooker environment of an American high school, but it's hard to empathise when your ears are bleeding.

Sean McNamara's live action adventure tries to press all the right buttons for its target audience.

There's much talk about clothes and boys and best friends forever, yet it's just so much processed cheesiness.

The only bright spots are Jon Voight's principal and Chelsea Staub's portrayal of a Paris Hilton-type bossy boots who tries to rule the school. The scenes where Meredith and her pooch spend a day shopping show what Bratz might have been if it had credited its audience with a little more wit and brainpower.

Usually it behoves grumpy old male and female critics to cut teen flicks some slack on the grounds that we're the last people they are aimed at, yet I went to a public screening rather than a press show and I was the only person in the theatre.

Wherever it's at for tweenagers it's clearly not Bratz, for which outbreak of good taste let us all give thankz.