The flicks
There’s no brickbat for this brick-Batman, who is on fire in THE LEGO BATMAN MOVIE, but THE BOSS BABY is more boo-hoo than ha ha
THE LEGO BATMAN MOVIE (PG)
Director: Chris McKay (animated feature debut) Starring: the voices of Will Arnett, Zach Galifianakis, Rosario Dawson, Michael Cera, Ralph Fiennes. Rating: JUST in time for the April school holidays comes this welcome news: everything is still awesome in the Lego movie-verse.
Just like 2014’s insanely enjoyable The Lego Movie, The Lego Batman Movie takes many interchangeable bits and pieces from all over the place, then swiftly builds something totally unexpected and unrelentingly fun. Kids are definitely going to love it in an instant, and laugh along with it the whole way. Any teen or adult who carries a Bat-gene in their DNA will fall even harder for the sophisticated satirical rush given off by the entire experience.
On first impressions, The Lego Batman Movie is definitely an action comedy.
In fact, right from the get-go, it is an astonishingly well-written one, effortlessly matching Deadpool for great jokes and grand mayhem delivered at blinding speed.
However, the film also dissects and expands the myth of Gotham City’s Caped Crusader in a manner that a majority of Bat-flicks — with the obvious exclusion of Christopher Knight’s incomparable Dark Knight trilogy — has invariably failed to do.
The Batman we meet here (voiced with a ridiculously fitting dude-bro rasp by Will Arnett) is living a dual existence that has brought him to the brink of obsolescence.
Sure, Batman might still be a superhero by day. Just check out the brilliant opening sequence here, where he makes short work of the Joker (Zach Galifianakis) and every other Bat-nemesis there has ever been.
At night, however, Batman is a superzero. Every evening, he slinks back into the dreary undercover guise of billionaire recluse Bruce Wayne, pops some lobster thermidor in the microwave, and watches Jerry Maguire alone on his couch.
Just to deepen the rut in which Batman now finds himself, Gotham’s new police
THE BOSS BABY (G)
Director: Tom McGrath Starring: the voices of Alec Baldwin, Steve Buscemi, Jimmy Kimmel, Lisa Kudrow, Tobey Maguire Rating: The casting of Alec Baldwin as the voice of a conniving, corporate infant in this animated comedy for children seems like an inspired move. Until you hear it.
All novelty value mined from Baldwin putting blunt business-speak in the mouth of a cute little bubba is spent very quickly here indeed.
The filmmakers of The Boss Baby appear to have forgotten their target audience is primary schoolers hopped up on fizzy drinks and sugar snacks.
That lot couldn’t give a hoot the title role went to the guy currently famous for impersonating Donald Trump on Saturday Night Live.
So much space is cleared for Baldwin to do the brusque-brat-in-nappies thing that the rest of The Boss Baby often feels quite cramped and cluttered.
That means the hopes of a relatively commissioner Barbara Gordon (Rosario Dawson) has quite rightly drawn the public’s attention to some black spots on his track record.
Over his many decades of duty, crime rates in Gotham have never, ever fallen. But the number of costumed and branded criminals has steadily risen.
Oh, and while Batman is the best when it comes to beating up those bad dudes, he has never brought one in to do any meaningful jail time. They always get away somehow.
With Batman understandably distracted and deflated by this turn of events, the Joker concocts his most nefarious scheme ever to finally destroy the Dark Knight.
That the Joker does so with the intermittent assistance of every big-screen no-good-nik you could possibly imagine — from Suicide Squad’s Harley Quinn to Harry Potter’s Lord Voldemort — means The Lego Batman Movie just keeps zinging from one surreally silly sequence to the next. ambitious plot (involving an over-imaginative seven-year-old child discovering a secret organisation exclusively run by babies) are dashed from too early on.
Mark this down as a mild let-down, and move on.