The Boss Baby

Honestly, I didn’t think I would watch The Boss Baby until at least this summer when it was out on Redbox to rent.

When I first heard about the film with a poster, I just hoped and assumed it was a joke. Then a teaser trailer and a real trailer happened. Then advertising in a lot of places. They are going full on with this movie, they are serious that it is real.

Just, honestly. Come on, fuck you Dreamworks. Your animation style for your not Dragon/Panda movies is usually terrible. Your plots are bad and simplistic. You will seemingly never reach the Disney/Pixar level of work if you continue to come up with shit. A talking baby that is secretly a CEO? Just, god damn it, Dreamworks.

Like someone saw Baby Geniuses or those E-Trade commercials and thought it was the perfect idea to make some money.

The only person here who isn’t trading stocks must be the kid sitting alone!

Our story starts with Tim (Miles Christopher Bakshi), a 7 year old kid, in love with the world. He has an overactive imagination which helps his play time as an only child. His mother (Lisa Kudrow) and father (Jimmy Kimmel) also spend a ton of time with him, even though they are both marketing workers at a place called Puppy Corp, which makes puppies or something. Oh, and he is about to have a baby brother.

Tim thinks his brother showed up on his own in a Taxi. He is already wearing a suit and a briefcase. He is a “boss” baby (Alec Baldwin), in that he immediately bosses around the house. He demands things of the parents. He takes up all of their love and attention and soon Tim feels alone.

But also, yeah, Tim finds the baby talking at one point. Perfect English. Being kind of a dick. Turns out this baby is from a place where babies come from. He was put into their management team, instead of given to a family, because he was the cream of the crop. They even have a special bottle formula to stay as babies forever, to help take care of baby interests.

And he was sent here on a mission. A spy mission. A deadly mission!? No, just a mission.

Steve Buscemi plays the Puppy Corp boss, and Tobey Maguire is the narrator/older Tim voice.

The sock straps freak me out seeing them on a baby.

I know the bias is coming out, but this was a terrible film. This is the worse thing Dreamworks Animation has put out since Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa. I somehow even liked Turbo more than this film.

Technically the whole thing is structured from an unreliable narrator, as we find out he is telling this story decades later, and we already established he has a big imagination, but it was too wild and over the place.

First of all, the plot is shit, the twists are shit, the mission, the backstory, it is just extremely poor writing. The comedy from the film mostly comes in the form of violence and arguing, between an adult baby and a regular kid. There is a scene where Tim records a baby meeting, which begins a way too long chase between the babies and him, to get the tape back. It is way too extreme and violent against the babies, I could barely stop rolling my eyes.

The baby also seemed to have some sort of magical powers as well that they never escaped. He could apparently teleport in the house to out of the house to in the house, because he kept appearing faster than he should have. And guess what, that is just still bad writing.

The animation wasn’t consistant. Eyebrows would get ripped off of a character, and somehow they showed them back the next scene, while acknowledging another character still having the ripped off eyebrows. Things would be thrown onto the ground and disappear a second later. The tiny inconsistencies between frames in a scene really made it look like a shoddy C grade performance. The parents forgot to act like parents at the end, for plot convenience, and didn’t question why their kids were suddenly in Vegas.

As a note, this film has references to other movies. We got an Indiana Jones scene, several Gandalf quotes from his alarm clock Wizzie, and even Baldwin quoting his famous lines from Glengarry Glen Ross. But references on their own cannot carry a movie, do not constitute real jokes, and are the second lowest form of comedy. Right above slapstick.

They really struck out with this film.