The movie, which is narrated by Tim as an adult (Tobey Maguire), never bothers to underline this point or work out the math, but its story is set at some indeterminate point in the past. The film is never funny, and its attempts to wink at the adults in the room are so lame that you wish they’d been left on the cutting room floor, but the deeper the film delves into Tim’s imagination the less imaginative it becomes.Īnd imagination is ultimately what “The Boss Baby” knows best. The bad guy in “The Boss Baby” wants to exterminate the entire human race (but like, in a cute way).
Watching Tim chase after his brother while pretending that he’s in an action scene from a ’70s TV show? Amusing! Watching Tim dress his brother like a dog so that they can break into a dog factory (don’t ask) and stop a dastardly plan to invent a puppy so adorable that people stop having babies? Not amusing. It’s an approach that milks the film’s basic idea for all its worth, while at the same time forcing the story away from the simple gags that give it life. Stretching the premise for a great Pixar short into the stuff of an exhausting 97-minute matinee, “The Boss Baby” imagines a dismally fanciful mythology for its diaper-filling namesake, padding out his hostile takeover of Tim’s family with some colorful nonsense about a corporation run by toddlers (complete with imagery borrowed from “The Apartment”) and a magical formula that keeps people from growing older. What’s happening in Tim’s head, well… it’s what happens when a child’s logic meets a screenwriter’s mandate. What’s happening in Tim’s house is simple enough to explain: He’s terrified that he’s being replaced. By the time Boss Baby strolls into the house wearing a suit and tie and carrying a tiny briefcase, it’s easy enough to parse between what’s happening in Tim’s house and what’s happening in Tim’s head. Fortunately, “Madagascar” director Tom McGrath has a bottomless well of visually clever ways to bounce between fantasy and reality. The film pinballs around the inner workings of Tim’s mind with the relentless mania of a sugar rush, adhering to what viewers have come to expect from the studio behind “Turbo” and “The Croods” (what Dreamworks lacks in artistry they compensate for with raw energy). READ MORE: Alec Baldwin Reveals Why He May Not Be Playing Trump On ‘Saturday Night Live’ For Much Longer Tim is totally cool with how things are - he thinks that three is the perfect number, that a triangle is the strongest shape in nature. “Do you want a little brother?” his dad asks. At night, Tim’s loving parents (Jimmy Kimmel and Lisa Kudrow) calm him down with a singalong to the Beatles’ “Blackbird.” His mom is obviously pregnant, but the kid doesn’t seem to notice or care. Waking up becomes a conversation with a wizard (his talking alarm clock is a Gandalf knockoff named Wizzy), dinner becomes an exotic hunt through the Congo, and the simple act of going downstairs becomes an undersea voyage on a nuclear submarine. Tim is every well-off white kid who grew up to be a storyteller: He’s got more creativity than he knows what to do with, and so he turns everything about his rather ordinary life into a grand adventure. Very loosely based on Marla Frazee’s 2010 children’s book of the same name, “The Boss Baby” is the inventively told story of a seven-year-old named Tim (voiced by Miles Christopher Bakshi), whose idyllic childhood is made all the better by his overactive imagination.
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