42. The Boss Baby
Here’s a movie I avoided for a long time but doing this list meant I had to confront the idea that I would need to give it a go. After finally seeing it I can confirm that The Boss Baby is a huge bundle of “WHAT?!” and “WHAT THE FUCK?!” respectively.
It’s not as crazy as Bee Movie… but it definitely resides within the same ballpark. Too many times during this movie, I was sitting there wondering what the hell I was watching and how it had come into existence. What helps is that there is some… self-awareness…? I think?
I can’t look at the scene where that creepy babysitter gets into a bike chase with the main elementary schooler character and a bunch of babies like some sort of extremely off-putting Looney Tunes cartoon and not think to myself that someone out there had to know that this was too absurd.
There’s a fine line between embracing the absurd and just looking like you’re giving up. I don’t want to say that this film did that though. It had a concept and it ran with it as hard as it could even if it doesn’t make a lick of sense. It’s weird because at the beginning of the film it sort of did.
There’s this baby who isn’t like the other babies in Heaven and he gets pushed off to the side to help manage BabyCorp. Okay.
There’s also this kid, our main character Tim Templeton(Miles Bakshi), who has a very creative mind and overactive imagination. He loves his parents and loves the attention he gets from his parents and as a result, comes into conflict with The Boss Baby when he arrives to their house wearing a suit and carrying a briefcase and is just suddenly now Tim’s baby brother.
… Alright… still sort of, kind of following along. I think?
His parents don’t find this random baby showing up to be weird. He arrived in a taxi and they just proclaim him to be their little brother. We find out at the end of the film that there’s mind wiping technology that the people from BabyCorp use so maybe they used it on them? But if so, then I’m not sure why the Boss Baby is so paranoid about the parents finding out.
Maybe they just didn’t give him one when they sent him on this mission, for some reason?
Either way, I did find myself enjoying Tim and his antics at the start. The imagination sequences he has reminded me a lot of Rugrats and I appreciated the more creative aspects behind how he views the world. He has this alarm clock that has a wizard attachment to it that he talks to. It’s never explicitly stated that he’s just having conversations with himself in reality because duh. Of course this wizard alarm clock isn’t actually alive so it doesn’t need to spell that out to us.
When he gets into a fight with the Boss Baby (Alec Baldwin) over proof he recorded of him speaking and planning in the living room, he gets grounded and his room is imagined to be a prison cell and he’s in prison clothing. It’s really neat.
I also appreciate just how open the film is to humiliating this kid for no reason. This baby being so in control of his situation that he can just throw something at this boy’s crotch and make him hunch over in pain and just have that be played off as a joke is so weird. I don’t know how this film gets away with what it does.
There’s so much butt in this movie. I know they’re babies and that’s the excuse they use to show it so much but it kept taking me off guard. Especially since there’s a scene where the Boss Baby farts baby powder out of his butt to the drum beat of the soundtrack at one point.
I dismantled pretty quickly there during the section where I was talking about what I was enjoying about this film because, honestly, it stops being easy to follow really quickly. It’s one of those films that doesn’t take much thought to unravel it’s plot. Put any ounce of thought into what’s happening and why and it stops making sense.
Like, you’d think the babies in Heaven at BabyCorp would be utilizing these babies for a reason that’s actually important. What could be so important that their chances at living a happy life down on Earth with a proper family have to be kept at bay? Well, it’s because puppies are cuter than babies now.
Apparently.
Yeah, the plot is that there’s this evil villain who used to be the best Boss Baby that BabyCorp ever had but was kicked out for not being cute enough, or something, I think, and then he was made to grow up on Earth but he kept his memories because he stole a special pacifier that allows him to do that. Without it, our Boss Baby, Ted, begins to mentally regress into an actual baby.
Oh yeah, there’s a scene where to see BabyCorp in Heaven, Tim has to suck on a pacifier with Ted and his dad walks in and sees the two of them doing this with their eyes closed and walks out.
Brilliant scene. A+.
Anyway, Francis E. Francis/Super Colossal Big Fat Boss Baby (Steve Buscemi) is the CEO of PuppyCo. and his plan is to make a super duper cute puppy that never grows old and stays cute forever so that babies won’t ever be used and Baby Corp will go out of business. Apparently.
This is treated as a big deal and like a thing that could somehow actually happen by the characters so I’m forced to relay this to you as a serious plot point against my will.
Even within the confines of it’s own world, this plan makes no sense.
Oh, and, the reason the Boss Baby is here is because Tim’s parents work for PuppyCo. That’s the reason the Boss Baby came here to spy on them on the off-chance that he’d get to go and shut down this operation.
He fails spectacularly at it too by the way. He almost becomes responsible for letting Baby Corp die as it were. If it weren’t for Tim’s help, he’d have been screwed.
Still, despite all the nonsense and stuff that makes zero sense, I did come away from the film sort of admiring parts of it if only because it did seem to have a bit of a heart by the end. The Boss Baby’s decision to stay with Tim as his brother, choosing to mentally regress himself and start over as an actual baby just to be with him IS cute.
It’s just… something that feels like it could have come on the heels of a better film.
I don’t… THINK it’s necessarily a terrible film but I can’t say that it’s good either. Apologies to all the Boss Baby fans out there I guess. Thankfully, the sequel is way better. I would actually call that one kind of good. Not this one though. Sorry.
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26 Mar 2025 00:36 CET
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