Baby-faced comedy that offers little to laugh about
The Boss Baby U Cert, 97 min Dir Tom McGrath Starring Alec Baldwin, Tobey Maguire, Miles Bakshi, Jimmy Kimmel, Lisa Kudrow, Steve Buscemi
Faced with the choice between a stony female cyborg and a malevolent infant in a business suit, America threw its lot in with The Boss Baby. Of course I’m talking about the US box office last weekend, where the new film from DreamWorks Animation outgrossed the Scarlett Johansson science-fiction thriller Ghost in the Shell by $30 million – a figure buoyed up by unexpected audience support in the heartlands.
Under happier circumstances, you might make sport of the result. But when it comes to The Boss Baby,y, there’s precious little to laugh about.
Based on a children’s book about a taxing tot who treats his parents like zero-hour flunkeys, Tom McGrath’s film is charming for exactly as long as it can keep that premise spinning without embellishment, which is around 15 minutes. That’s how long it takes for the film’s nefarious newborn, voiced by Alec Baldwin, to descend from an airborne baby factory and stage a hostile takeover of the Templeton household. Poor Ma and Pa T (Lisa Kudrow and Jimmy Kimmel) find their waking hours monopolised, while their firstborn, seven-year-old Timothy (Miles Bakshi), looks on with a vaguely Cain-like glint.
When the parents aren’t looking, Boss Baby coats his elder brother with puréed food and chases him round the garden in an exploding pedal car. It’s early-onset sibling rivalry blown up to Looney Tunes extremes. But while it’s easy to imagine, say, Pixar coming up with a diamond-hard conceit through which the book’s core idea could breathe and expand, the route Michael McCullers’s script opts for all but plugs a dummy in its mouth.
It entails a corporate sabotage plot. Boss Baby turns out to be an undercover agent of Baby Corp, and is on a mission to prevent the release of a new breed of puppy that’s so adorable it threatens to supplant human offspring as the must-have dependant for young couples, and thereby send the birth rate plummeting.
Propelling us through this, at least in theory, is Baldwin’s boardroom ball-buster shtick, which owes far less to his Donald Trump impersonation than his furious sales whizz in Glengarry Glen Ross. Whether Boss Baby is riffing on corporate retreats or double espressos, the punchline – a baby in a suit is behaving like an adult – never changes.
There’s more to be said for the animation itself. The book’s gently sketched visual style has been switched for an ebullient, retro-expressionist colour-whirl. If only it carried over to the characters themselves.