I was ready to loathe this film. Loathe. I had to restart it four times. Twice it put me to sleep. I ended up watching it in five pieces, each time dreading watching it anew. The first hour was as miserable a movie experience as I have had in several months. A terrible premise compounded by another terrible premise enhanced further by a “mystery” even the producers must have questioned made me believe I was watching the worst film of the year … and it’s only summer.
And then the fifth piece happened. And I liked parts of it.
Rats.
I mean, RATS. I really wanted to shout on high, “EUREKA! This is it, boys! 2021’s Hillbilly Elegy, Dinesh D’Souza, White Chicks, Ricki and the Flash, Madea X is here! This is the one I’ve been waiting for. I’ve scoured the bottom of the rancid cereal box and found the treasure trove of noxious banned substances posing as a toy surprise and it is every bit as bad as the one I found last year!”
But that didn’t happen. *sigh* Sometimes you just don’t hate a film as much as you think you’re going to. Oh well.
I suppose I can get excited about the set-up, which is terrible. Tim Timpleton (voice of James Marsden) has grown up and has his baby brother, Ted (Alec Baldwin). Both are family-aged men. Tim has a wife and children; Ted is still a self-important CEO. Both have forgotten the time when Ted was The Boss Baby. Thankfully, so have I. Tim’s youngest, Tina (Amy Sedaris) is a baby, and –as we know- babies in this world are highly intelligent, extremely coordinated, and deceitful con artists all in one. Tina poses as a toddler at home, but secretly works for BabyCorp, which is about as Deep State as the mythical Deep State gets.
The whole super baby thing is an awful premise. Just awful. You ought to be ashamed of yourselves.
Wait a sec. This is based on a book?! Somebody wrote the screenplay with a reading audience in mind?
Tina gives herself away as super intelligent so as to manipulate her father and uncle into going undercover at the elementary school attended by Tim’s other kids. To go undercover, Tim and Ted have to age backwards until they become small children again themselves, which they fight over, because, you know, who doesn’t want to be a baby again, amIright? This is not only a terrible premise; it makes me believe that the animation team still had templates left over from the first film. You know, “reuse reduce recycle” is a great motto for helping combat climate change, but a shitty motto for an animation studio.
And why do you need to go undercover at an elementary school? What is an elementary school hiding that can’t be found by, you know, looking?
Oh, but there is a mystery at the school. And it’s a bad one. And it leads to the plot to eliminate all parents. I’m not sure this is quite the winner you think it is, movie. A lot of kids actually
don’t want their parents around, even when they think about it. If you prance about expecting this “crazy” plot of kids getting rid of their parents to fall upon ridiculed laughter, well, you’ll have more than a few children rooting for the bad guys.
So that was the beginning and one I was willing to destroy in print.
And then, dammit, the film got better. It forgot its lame-ass plot and terrible assumptions and focused on two relationships: 1) Tim and Ted 2) Tim and his older daughter Tabitha (Ariana Greenblatt), a child who is growing up a little too fast for her own good. And this is, unfortunately, where the movie works, and the only time in The Boss Baby: Family Business in which I actually gave a rat’s ass about any of the characters in the film.
Look, I’m not going to tell you The Boss Baby: Family Business was anything brilliant. It wasn’t. It was yet another cynical sequel to an original idea born of stupidity. While I –apparently- enjoyed the original (news to me!), I can’t name a single reason why I would recommend this franchise to any single human. “Cuz it’s fun to imagine babies are really supersmart and just choose to act like selfish assholes?” Yeah, um, no. I far prefer the world in which babies are adorable and helpless and we have to take care of them to prolong our species … and I’m not sure I want to associate with anybody who thinks otherwise.
That said … the film could have been worse. A lot worse.
♪I wasn’t lookin’, but somehow it found me
An instance of televised blight
But like Jason or Freddy
This diaper-clad heavy
Is keeping me petrified with fright
And nobody slummed it better
Makes me feel sad for the quest
Nobody cashed in on premise so paper-thin
(Boss) Baby two is a mess♫
Rated PG, 107 Minutes
Director: Tom McGrath
Writer: Tom McGrath and Michael McCullers
Genre: Look who’s eye-rolling [answer: me]
Type of being most likely to enjoy this film: People fascinated with their own babies, maybe?
Type of being least likely to enjoy this film: People who cut out after hour one … and nobody blames you. Nobody at all.
♪ Parody Inspired by “Nobody Does It Better”
