Review of The Boss Baby (2017) by Lrbohnert — 02 Apr 2017

But aside from this barely veiled CGI re-creation of our commander in chief and the fear and lies he sells, what solutions does The Boss Baby offer? The Boss Baby, a grumpy infant who wears diapers because he’s too busy doing business to make a trip to the bathroom, is fundamentally damaged, we learn. The reason he’s in “upper baby management” instead of just being a normal baby is due to a sorting process during which he fails to giggle adorably when tickled by a feather. He has no real parents, and having been sent straight to work on his first day of life, he missed out on his entire childhood. “I wasn’t born, I was hired,” he says.

The Boss Baby’s redemption can only arrive when he realizes that he would rather be a baby than a boss. When he finally gets that big promotion and realizes how lonely it is at the top, he quits his post. He rejoins the baby masses and goes back through the baby-sorting line, having now learned to love and feel joy over the course of his adventure with Timmy. He’s redelivered to Timmy’s parents, this time as a cute, normal, gurgling baby.

The message is undeniable: Even if a baby says he wants to be a boss, he really wants to be a baby. We should not let bosses be babies, because they are babies. All other films hoping to become the official cinematic standard-bearer of #TheResistance, take a seat. This is the most damning political narrative of 2017.