The Boss Baby

            In 2014, due to “Mr. Peabody & Sherman” and “Penguins of Madagascar” being underwhelming at the box office, Dreamworks Animation has been seeing a great deal of bad luck for them. Whether or not the films were critically praised, they ended up having to lay-off many of their employees and end up being sold to Universal, which will ultimately result in Dreamworks becoming part of Illumination…I don’t know if that last part is true, but we’ll have to wait and see. But what this DOES mean, is that 2017 will be their last year of films that were overseen by its former CEO and founder, Jeffrey Katzenberg. And one of the two we’ll be talking about today is “The Boss Baby.”

            The film centers around Tim Templeton, an only child who enjoys the attention given by his parents. Suddenly, a baby enters into his life that suddenly takes the attention away from him, and Tim’s not too happy about it. After discovering that the baby can talk and is an associate from Babycorp, the two agree to help each other out, by accomplishing the Boss Baby’s mission of taking out Puppy Co, so Tim can go back to being a single child.

            Now after seeing the trailers for this movie, I thought this looked like complete garbage. I don’t know, maybe the whole talking babies thing got old by the time “Rugrats” was coming to an end, so that might have something to do with it. That, and there have been multiple times when Dreamworks is very hit or miss with their animated films. Sometimes we’ll get something fantastic like “Kung Fu Panda,” “Rise of the Guardians,” or “How to Train Your Dragon,” and other times we’ll get “Home,” “Trolls,” or even a “Bee Movie.” The question on everybody’s mind, is where does “The Boss Baby” land on that chart? Well…it’s not awful, but it’s not that good either.

            Let’s start with the animation. Tom McGrath, a frequent director at Dreamworks, has turned out some incredibly sharp looking films in the past. Take “Megamind” and the “Madagascar” trilogy for example: those films have some very quick and exaggerated gestures, but can also showcase some incredibly smooth movement when the scenes call for it. He’s proved his versatility when it comes to having animation truly pop off the screen. With “The Boss Baby,” it’s looks fine and feels like something that would belong in theatres, but it doesn’t have the same kind of spark of motion that I’ve talked about. It isn’t until the third act that we get that exaggeration that I’ve talked about, whereas the rest of the movie feels like Ralphie’s brother in “A Christmas Story,” where the movement is restrained by three snow coats too many.

            The writing, much like the animation, is pretty standard. It’s the typical “Odd Couple” scenario, where two people can’t stand living in the same place, so they do what they can to get rid of the other, then try to work together so they get what they want, only to realize that they enjoy each other’s company after all. Of course, originality doesn’t matter as long as the spectacle is different, as I’ve come to learn over the years…this film doesn’t do that. You know exactly how the plot is going to go, hitting the tropes note for note, and it doesn’t leave you with much surprise. Same goes for that whole, “prove to the dumb parents that don’t believe you,” trope that, again, after seeing this trope done before, especially having decade long shows with that, it becomes tiresome. Even most of the jokes don’t really land that hard, being the typical “oh, he’s a baby with the mindset of a businessman and doesn’t want to do the toddler things! Isn’t that funny? Hurr hurr hurr!” Sure, some of the them get a chuckle or two out of me, especially when they went as far as to put in a Baby Jesus joke, but for the most part, there’s no surprise.

            With the cast and characters, it’s what you expect. Miles Bakshi as Tim? Okay. Lisa Kudrow and Jimmy Kimmel as the parents? Meh. Alec Baldwin as the Boss Baby? Fine. Honestly, the only performance that stuck out to me was Steve Buscemi as the bad guy, mostly because of how sinister he makes his plan seem, no matter how dumb it sounds when I say it.

            Yeah, there’s not much else I can say about “The Boss Baby.” It’s just a standard C- level animated movie. While it is harmless, I can’t actually think of anything that would make me think anybody would want to watch it. It’s not even at a level of “so bad, you have to see it to believe it.” It’s just…meh. It’s a ‘meh’ kind of movie.

Rating: 4/10