Review of The Boss Baby (2017) by Matt C — 20 Apr 2017

The Boss Baby is one of those rare movies that I actually wasn't that opposed to seeing because it just looked so bizarre. Even after seeing it, The Boss Baby feels like a movie that would take place within the 30 Rock universe alongside Honky Grandma Be Trippin', Fat Bitch, and Who Dat Ninja, but it still isn't really bizarre enough--or at least not in a good way.

I wouldn't have expected this movie be this unfocused and have such a confusing plot, but those are actually valid and pervasive issues here. Aside from a few moments that were had me thinking, "I still refuse to believe this is a real movie" and some good animation, it's so scattershot that I checked out before the halfway point.

Tim (Miles Christopher Bakshi) is a seven-year-old who becomes jealous and annoyed when his parents (Jimmy Kimmel and Lisa Kudrow) decide that he's going to get a younger brother, and said infant brother (Alec Baldwin) arrives in a taxi wearing a suit.

Tim is the only one that finds this to be weird--it isn't explained why no one else questions this. You see, in this universe, babies are created in the sky and then sorted into being parts of families or working management jobs in offices, and this baby falls within the latter.

His job is to... infiltrate this family and reinstate parents' love of babies instead of puppies, which are monopolizes the cuteness that babies thrive on? I really don't know, honestly. This is what's explained in the first 30 minutes or so and it only gets messier from there.

I really don't know what to say about this thing. The Boss Baby defies film criticism because it isn't entirely a film as much as it is an amalgamation of ADHD and Pixy Stix-fueled sequences. Baldwin seems to be having fun here and the movie probably would have been insufferable in another actor's hands, but he doesn't redeem the movie from the fact that it truly is a clusterfuck.

It's almost about sibling rivalry, then it takes a series of randomized diversions for an hour, and then it goes back to the sibling rivalry theme. The puppies, Vegas, Elvis impersonators, Steve Buscemi, and adult-targeted jokes constantly distract from what semblance of cohesion the movie flirts with having, and it may only be 98 minutes, but there's so little to grasp onto that it did feel longer.

Some of the animation is clever and it has a way of emulating the full-throttle imagination of a little boy at times, but often at the expense of feeling well put together. Some movies are rough around the edges--this one has no edges.

Its throw-everything-to-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks construction makes for a movie that's hard to describe, and not in a good way. 4.2/10, bad, C-, definitely below average, etc.