Review of Baby Geniuses (1999) by 30Cents — 20 Jul 2015

We all come across some memorable and beautiful films a lot of the time, films that do not disappoint and makes us all happy. That is not the case with "Baby Geniuses", a film released in 1999 starring Christopher Lloyd and Kathleen Turner as the main villains. The film was directed by Bob Clarke; if you are unfamiliar with this director, he directed the memorable holiday movie "A Christmas Story". So why did the director start to make these kind of films? We my never know.

"Baby Geniuses" sounds like a movie that would come free with a box of diapers, put your child in the diaper and he/she will instantly become smarter than any other infant out there. These babies do not prove to be a genius at all, this film should be properly titled "Baby Smart-alecs". Because these so called "babies" have a bad mouth, cursing and fooling around with others to annoy the audience instead of being funny. Besides the fact that these infants are unlikable, all the other characters are about as hated as the toddlers. You should not care for any of the characters in the movie much less like them.

The jokes are all unfunny and some even repeat; for example, a few characters say the term "diaper gravy" a total of three times in the movie. I guess the screenwriters of the film liked this joke so much that they wanted to repeat a poop joke. Another example is when two men dressed as janitors try to capture one of the infants, the scene then turns into a cat-mouse situation where one of the men predict that they will be hit in the balls with a ski board. Obviously the man does get hit and walks out, the other man who is also dressed as a janitor comes and the exact same thing happens, I am not even kidding. Besides jokes repeating, every joke tries to be funny and original, none of the jokes are funny nor original.

The film starts out with the two main villains (played by Christopher Lloyd and Kathleen Turner), they announce their new park properly titled "Joyworld". The scientists both think that every baby is born to use a secret language that adults cannot hear. One of the geniuses named Sylvester escapes the hands of the two villains by jumping in a dirty diaper truck (this is supposed to be funny for some reason). Sylvester finds his twin brother who apparently never knew each other for some reason, but one of them is kidnapped by the two villains and is tested to do more experimenting.

Another thing to mention is that when the infants talk their mouth never sync with the voices in the background. This happens from beginning to end, even the voices cannot help this movie be any better. The film editors could have made the infants not talk, but still have the voice overs. This film could have been like "The Adventures of Milo and Otis" where the animals never move their mouths, but still have voice actors talking for them.

"Baby Geniuses" is a movie that should not have ever been shown to the public and instead left on the shelf. Be sure if you are buying/renting a family movie, make sure you walk past this one.