Review of The Boss Baby (2017) by Nicholas R — 30 Jul 2017

This is a movie about a kid's imagination. It's the movie The Secret Life of Pets should have been before it got derailed into insanity. It's brilliant, but I'm afraid most older audiences won't get it. They'll judge it by its cover and assume it's another stupid animated movie, when it's actually really well crafted and much better than that. Though I'll admit it has a few pretty cringey Lord of the Rings references that really should have been cut.

This movie contains several layers of reality. It begins in the green and purple world of the kid's imagination, and returns there on occasion. However, even when it's supposedly showing the real world there are still explosions and fantastical things going on that are revealed to be not real when it briefly pulls back to the adults' perspective. This is a great setup for a movie with a fantastically unrealistic plot, since really any of it could be imagined by the kid, and a lot of it definitely is.

Also, it has a very strong moral that the kid learns by experiencing a direct analogy to his own situation. As an only child, he's accustomed to getting all his parents' love, but when the new baby arrives, the baby gets all the attention instead of him! However, he's soon roped into a secret mission with the new baby: his parents' company is about to create the "forever puppy", and when that happens, puppies will get all the love instead of babies! He bonds with the new baby a lot on this mission, finds he misses the baby when he's gone in an excellent WestWorld reference, and it all culminates in a beautiful iconic scene that demonstrates he's learned that love can be shared and there's enough to go around. It really brought a tear to my eye.

Unfortunately, Trump supporters are going to bash this movie for starring Alec Baldwin due to his portrayal of Trump on SNL. That 's gonna lower its score a bit. But IMHO this movie is good and I'm glad I saw it.