The Boss Baby
Directed by: Tom McGrath
Written by: Michael McCullers - Based on the book by Marla Frazee
Voices by: Alec Baldwin, Miles Bakshi, Jimmy Kimmel, Lisa Kurdow, Steve Buscemi, Tobey Maguire, James McGrath, Conrad Vernon, ViviAnn Yee, Eric Bell Jr., David Soren
Animation/Comedy/Family - 97 min Reviewed by Charlie Juhl on 28 Mar 2017
Written by: Michael McCullers - Based on the book by Marla Frazee
Voices by: Alec Baldwin, Miles Bakshi, Jimmy Kimmel, Lisa Kurdow, Steve Buscemi, Tobey Maguire, James McGrath, Conrad Vernon, ViviAnn Yee, Eric Bell Jr., David Soren
Animation/Comedy/Family - 97 min Reviewed by Charlie Juhl on 28 Mar 2017
In 2016, Storks taught audiences babies come from a magic machine and are then delivered by storks air mail. That is until the storks transitioned to a new business model, think Amazon rather than Buy Buy Baby. In The Boss Baby, babies are once again formed assembly line style from a magic machine but rather than complicate transportation with avian middle-men, the babies arrive at your front door via taxi. The entity behind the magic machine, determining which babies are suitable for families and which to vector toward the executive track, and above all, monitoring baby love market share is Baby Corp; a massive cubical farm led by only a select few baby CEOs.
The split between the Baby Corp rank and file and the brass also bisects how The Boss Baby’s audience will perceive the film. For every fart joke, food projectile, and utterance of a phrase like “poop dooty”, there is an equal and opposite adult joke referring to Glengarry Glen Ross, prison shivs, and Elvis. I do not believe there is a time where parents and their children will laugh at the same joke; my son and I certainly didn’t. When Boss Baby (Alec Baldwin, Concussion) farts and a puff of baby powder ejects from his butt, my son about lost his mind. When Tim (Miles Bakshi), Boss Baby’s older brother, is shackled to a metaphorical prison wall and his Gandalf-like alarm clock wishes for his magical shank, I laughed just as hard to the puzzlement of the kid.
The split between the Baby Corp rank and file and the brass also bisects how The Boss Baby’s audience will perceive the film. For every fart joke, food projectile, and utterance of a phrase like “poop dooty”, there is an equal and opposite adult joke referring to Glengarry Glen Ross, prison shivs, and Elvis. I do not believe there is a time where parents and their children will laugh at the same joke; my son and I certainly didn’t. When Boss Baby (Alec Baldwin, Concussion) farts and a puff of baby powder ejects from his butt, my son about lost his mind. When Tim (Miles Bakshi), Boss Baby’s older brother, is shackled to a metaphorical prison wall and his Gandalf-like alarm clock wishes for his magical shank, I laughed just as hard to the puzzlement of the kid.
It is not careful family planning and kismet why Boss Baby shows up on the family’s doorstep much to 7 year-old Tim’s jealous chagrin. It’s a business maneuver. Boss Baby is on official Baby Corp business to thwart the ascendence of puppy love at the expense of baby love. Tim’s parents (Lisa Kudrow (The Girl on the Train) and Jimmy Kimmel) are executives at Puppy Corp and Boss Baby has limited time to discover Puppy Corp’s new product sure to saturate the love market and sabotage it. After the rocky start between the brothers with Tim severely put out about the lack of attention shown to him now that there is a new baby in the house, the two decide to pool their talents so Boss Baby can move on at the end of a successful espionage mission.
Director Tom McGrath, a veteran of the first three Madagascar films, saves the plot mechanics of Boss Baby attempting to infiltrate and dismantle the puppy operation for the climax. Most of The Boss Baby is the feud between Tim and the baby and their back-and-forth, tit-for-tat shenanigans. The inevitable sub-plot of the two becoming more than allies and actually brothers simmers beneath the surface until the requisite feelings show up later hovers around the edges as does Boss Baby’s peculiar physical nature. Boss Baby takes Tim on a Baby Corp tour which ends up disconcerting both Tim and the audience when they realize remaining an infant is Boss Baby’s long-term goal and skipping over that whole childhood and growing up metamorphosis thing.
Even though the premise sounds off-putting, The Boss Baby really does land its jokes, a credit to writer Michael McCullers whose time on Saturday Night Live's writing staff and authorship of two Austin Powers films is evident. The kids will rejoice at the thought of a baby leader pulling the wool over all the adults’ eyes and I appreciated the detail in the Raiders of the Lost Ark homage and have been quoting the Elvis sequence all week at work. Naturally, when one has to get to Las Vegas quickly, there is always an aircraft full of Elvis impersonators ready to take-off from the local airport. The older siblings in the audience may identify with the “My life was perfect until you showed up” point of view; I don’t know, I was the youngest child in my family. But I see where Tim is coming from; his parents really don’t do the most effective job balancing the needs of their two kids. The storks never had that problem; they just delivered the packages.
Comment Box is loading comments...
