I passed out during The Boss Baby. This is not from my being tired, as I was very caffeinated for the show. This was because I saw The Boss Baby in 3D, and my body had the same reaction it had to all of the obnoxious tricks that Godard was pulling in Goodbye to Language. I got very warm, and then my body decided it was time to take a breather from the visual obnoxiousness on screen. The Boss Baby is very visually obnoxious. It frequently throws hundreds of objects at you or engages in rapid fire editing. By the end of the movie, my head was pounding and my body was ready for bed. It’s an exhausting film where the filmmakers literally jingle keys at the screen.
For what it’s worth, The Boss Baby is simultaneously not as bad as you imagined and worse than you imagined. Tim Templeton (Tobey Maguire), a spoiled 7-year-old son whose parents read three stories and sing a special song for him before bedtime, loses his shit when his parents bring home a new baby brother who wears a suit all the time and demands all of the attention of the house. The Boss Baby (Alec Baldwin) is a management executive from BabyCorp intent on destroying some new development from PuppyCo that is being introduced at some convention..zzzzzzz.
Whuh? Sorry. This movie is trying to make you care about PC vs Apple, and testing your devotion to Sparkle Motion. For some reason, Tim creates an elaborate fantasy where The Boss Baby is going to be returned if only they can prevent people from caring about Puppies more than Babies. The Boss Baby takes pleasure in corporate espionage and rooting for one side to be sneaky to bring down the other side. It’s basically like rooting for Samsung stealing Apple’s patents, but booing when Apple steals Samsung’s patents.
Perhaps worse than its pro-corporate messaging is The Boss Baby‘s weirdly inappropriate visual gags department. It starts at the beginning when The Boss Baby is going through a factory for how babies are born and sorted, and The Boss Baby is an inept baby who ends up backwards on the conveyor belt. The machine puts booties on his hands instead of his feet, and powders his face instead of his butt. But, then there’s the question of the pacifier with a backwards baby and it might go in the baby’s bottom! Oh boy!
Normally, I would let that type of gag slide, but there’s a later gag where The Boss Baby forces Tim to suck on a pacifier so he can take Tim back to a hallucination of BabyCorp. In the real world, The Boss Baby are sitting face to face engaged in mutual synchronized sucking of binkies. Their father walks in the room, but then backs out slowly. If that’s not enough, there’s a visual celebration for The Boss Baby where a bunch of other babies circle around him and squirt milk out of their baby bottles, covering his face and body in their thick milk. Yeah, there’s baby bukkake in The Boss Baby.
Despite the pro-Corporate messaging and the headache-inducing visual noise, The Boss Baby is occasionally not terrible. It has occasionally inspired sequences (some inspired by the children’s classic Glengarry Glen Ross) of zany madcap fun. For kids, its A-message of an only child adjusting to a new baby brother is timely enough. The visual metaphors representing the invasion of a new baby prevents The Boss Baby from being a completely unwatchable waste of time. I don’t recommend seeking it out as an adult, but, then, I also wouldn’t bring an age-appropriate child because of the awful corporate messages. *shrug*?
