Review of The Boss Baby (2017) by John M — 19 Sep 2017

It's the middle of the road. So what you may not know is that the infants across the globe are actually organized behind the scenes and waging a war against puppies because there is only so much love to go around in the world.

This is about a baby (Alec Baldwin) who comes to a family with a secret agenda, but will he be able to coexist with his older brother (Miles Bakshi) and execute his mission? As silly as this looked, there was a small part of me that wanted to see this.

Not enough interest to check this out in a theater, mind you, but enough for this to be bumped to the top of my Netflix queue when it hit DVD. The Boss Baby isn't bad, it's just exactly what it looks like with very few surprises.

Now this is DreamWorks, so you can't go in expecting Pixar. That said, they are capable at producing some high quality products, like Kung Fu Panda and How to Train Your Dragon. This, however, is on the same level as something like Monsters vs.

Aliens, so expect a lot of visual gags and swipes made at low hanging fruit. There are also references that are exclusively for adults and wildly inappropriate for a kids movie; I would never imagine that I would see a Glengarry Glen Ross joke in something that is rated PG, but I suppose this is the world we live in.

Unless you were living under a rock for the first quarter of this year, you already know that Alec Baldwin promoted the hell out of this movie. He doesn't phone it in, either; inexplicably, he really is voice acting his ass off, which probably means that he collected a big paycheck for this.

If this is so, then that makes me happy, because he truly deserves it. This is cute enough, and its saving grace is that it moves quickly. The jokes don't all hit, and it ends up being about a 50/50 split (there is the equivalent of a Gandalf alarm clock that got me every time, though).

There are visual things that work, but then there is also imagination animation that I like in concept, but it looks like it was done on the cheap as a means of saving money. There is also padding, and it's not even what anything that I would consider to be bad padding, but I do feel that it exists solely to make this a feature length film.

Overall, this feels like this is something that you would stream for your kids on Netflix, and I'm sure this will make its way over there in the next few months.