Film Review: "The Boss Baby"

The Boss Baby - Movie Review

Its a routine feeling to want a movie to be smarter. Every so often,though, you may want a movie to be a little dumber to be true to what it actually is. The Boss Baby, the jokey new 3D animated lark from DreamWorks Animation (its being distributed by 20th Century Fox), is a visually brisk, occasionally clever low-concept comedy thats also trying, half-heartedly, to be some sort of Pixarish masterpiece. You may wind up wishing that it had been one or the other.

The title character is an insanely precocious, arrogant, walking-and-talking infant who dresses in a black business suit, carries a briefcase, has big marble eyes that narrow down to devious slits, and snaps out observations and demands in the mellifluous cutthroat voice of Alec Baldwin, who has a peerless gift for making bombs-away statements that dont raise his pulse by a beat. The character, who is never called anything but Boss Baby, is a kick to look at, with a blockish head thats nearly as tall as his body, and he gets to bark out a lot of lines like Wheres HR when you need em? or (upon being told that he hates someone) Hate is a strong word. Its the right word, but still

The Boss Baby was loosely inspired by Marla Frazees 2010 childrens book, and if the movie had simply had been a feature-length Look Whos Talking riff about a tyrannical baby whos running the household like a corporate titan (a perfect metaphor, of course, for how the parents of a newborn feel he really is the boss), it might have been a perfect throwaway hoot. Back in 1989 and 90, the critics were never too kind to the Look Whos Talking films they were held in contempt but this critic, for one, found them more funny than not, and there is of course one fantastic talking baby in popular culture: the snobbish, irascible, hilariously merciless Stewie on Family Guy the purest expression of Seth MacFarlanes id on that show. As a character, Boss Baby is like an executive knockoff of Stewie, and though his lines arent as witty or adult scandalous, as long as youre chuckling at his autocratic bravura, the movieis amusing enough.

But heres whats a little weird and overly complicated about it. In Frazees book, Boss Baby simplyis. (The same way that Stewie is.) In The Boss Baby, he arrives from Baby Corp., a baby-making corporation in the sky thats like an assembly-line version of Heaven as the little brother of Tim (voiced by Miles Christopher Bakshi, and as the films grown-up, looking-back narrator by Tobey Maguire). Tim is a seven-year-old boy who thought that life was perfect when it was just him and his parents (voiced with generic sweetness by Jimmy Kimmel and Lisa Kudrow), crooning him to sleep with family renditions of Blackbird. But Tim, who indulges his penchant for make-believe by turning everything that happens to him into a story, is threatened by the new baby, because hes suddenly not getting the attention he craves. To him, the infant is the enemy. So the whole tale were watching of how Boss Baby comes in and takes over isnt actually happening. Its Tims elaborate fantasy of whats happening. Got it?

The conceit makes perfect sense, and doesnt sound all that complicated, but it still makes your head hurt, because the director, Tom McGrath (of the Madagascar films), working from a script by Michael McCullers, tries to use the its-all-in-Tims-mind premise to turn The Boss Baby into a variation on Inside Out: not just a daffy comic trifle about an authoritarian tot, but a timeless tale of the imagination, and of how kids use it to ease their heartache. The trouble is, instead of taking us deeper into a childs reality the way Inside Out did, The Boss Baby is at once overly busy and oddly detached from a childs reality. The conceit stays locked on that one literal level (though occasionally we see what Tims parents see just two kids playing), and so basically were watching an elaborately kooky junior buddy movie that pretends to be about experience but is really about throwing an overly arduous chase comedy in the audiences face.

Commercially, theres no reason that this shouldnt work out just fine. The Boss Baby is blithe, fast-moving, and dazzlingly animated, with the kind of supple, light-reflecting surfaces that may remind you of the lustrous visual textures that Brad Bird brought off in Ratatouille. There are irresistible bits, like the opening Baby Corp. delivery sequence, or Boss Babys James Brown funk waddle out of his taxi, or a baby action sequence set to the theme from S.W.A.T., or the moment leading up to the climactic sequence in Las Vegas that features a bunch of Elvis impersonators whose Fat Elvis patter is so slurry-cool it practically leaves words behind.

yet theres a reason the Boss Baby still feels standard issue and a wee bit tiresome. It has one of those relentless mechanical plot lines thats all booby-trapped logistics in this case, about how Boss Baby is on a mission from Baby Corp. to stave off an epidemic of puppy love. It seems the growing obsession with cute new dog breeds is draining away the love for babies, and at the Vegas Convention Center, its up to Boss Baby to gather intel on a new pooch about to be launched: a creature called the Forever Puppy whose endless adorability represents the ultimate threat. This is the definition of a clanking cartoon narrative that doesnt matter because it doesnt signify anything, emotional or otherwise. Whereas the plot of a movie like Inside Out or, on a less heady but still artfully affecting level, Finding Dory or Trolls has an organic undertow.

Will kids go for The Boss Baby? Theyll crack up at parts of it, like a grooming montage that features a bare-b**t baby-powder fart, and theyll enjoy the image of Boss Baby, with his ridiculous glowering command. So will adults. But hes a character who deserves a better movie, one thats more fun and less pleased with itself.

Source: http://variety.com/2017/film/reviews/the-boss-baby-review-alec-baldwin-1202004561/