DreamWorks Animation had a picture book by Marla Frazee, a suit, and Alec Baldwin. The Boss Baby turns that into 97 minutes of spy comedy about a baby who runs a corporation and a 7-year-old who cannot prove any of it. The film premiered at the Miami International Film Festival on March 12, 2017, and 20th Century Fox released it in the United States on March 31. It made $528 million worldwide against a $125 million budget. Money is not the same thing as a good movie.
Trailer, via Universal Kids.
Tim Templeton Cannot Prove a Thing
The story is told by Tim, a wildly imaginative 7-year-old voiced by Miles Bakshi. The film’s own synopsis calls him a delightfully unreliable narrator. That is the smartest idea in the movie, and the movie does not trust it.
Tim’s new brother arrives in a suit and tie. Around Mom and Dad he acts like an infant. When they leave the room he holds staff meetings. Baldwin voices the Boss Baby with the corporate bluster he has been doing for decades, and it lands often enough to carry a scene.
The problem is that Tim’s unreliability never costs him anything. He tries to record the baby’s meeting on tape. The tape gets destroyed. He is grounded for trying to get rid of the baby and ordered to stay in the house until he learns to get along. That is a real consequence, and the film treats it as an obstacle rather than a wound. A movie that announces an unreliable narrator should make you doubt him. The Boss Baby only makes you wait for the next gag.
Baby Corp Runs on a Formula
Once Baby reveals where he comes from, the film stops being a family comedy and becomes an espionage picture. Tim and Baby suck a special pacifier and see Baby Corp, where babies come from. Most babies go to families. Those unresponsive to tickling are sent to management and given a special formula that lets them think and behave like adults while staying young forever.
Baby is on a mission. Love for babies is declining because of puppies, and Tim’s parents work for Puppy Co. Baby came to the Templeton house to investigate, and he leaves once the job is done. Do the job and he gets promoted to CEO. The boys hear Baby’s boss threaten to fire him if he fails, which would mean Baby stays, has his formula taken away, slowly turns into a normal baby, and grows up with the Templetons.
That is a dark premise for a family film, and it is the best material here. The stakes are clear: a career, an identity, a brother. The film spends them on chase sequences.
Jimmy Kimmel and Lisa Kudrow Get Nothing
Kimmel and Kudrow voice Dad and Mom, and both are underused. Tobey Maguire narrates as Adult Tim, which frames the whole thing as a memory. Conrad Vernon voices Eugene. ViviAnn Yee voices Staci. Eric Bell Jr. voices the Triplets. James McGrath voices Wizzie and an Elvis impersonator. Edie Mirman voices Big Boss Baby. David Soren voices Jimbo.
The voice cast is stacked and the script gives most of them one note each. Kimmel and Kudrow are parents in a movie about what a new baby does to a family, and they get almost nothing to play.
Tom McGrath directs. Michael McCullers writes. The picture is loosely based on Frazee’s book, and “loosely” is doing heavy lifting. The book is a short, sharp joke about a baby who acts like a manager. The film builds a mythology around that joke and then a franchise on top of it.
Two Series and a Sequel
The Boss Baby was a commercial success, and that success spawned two television series, The Boss Baby: Back in Business and The Boss Baby: Back In the Crib, plus a sequel film, The Boss Baby: Family Business. None of that is an argument about quality. It is an argument about a premise that sells.
The film received mixed reviews from critics. It was nominated for Best Animated Feature at the 90th Academy Awards, the Annie Awards, and the Golden Globes. A nomination is a signal that enough voters found something worth honoring. Here it reads as a signal about the field, not the film.
What actually matters in The Boss Baby is the formula. A baby who stays young forever as long as he performs is a better idea than anything the movie does with it. The Boss Baby wants to be about whether Tim and Baby can be brothers, and it keeps interrupting itself to be about a corporate war between babies and puppies.
The Numbers
- Title: The Boss Baby
- Release: March 31, 2017, United States, via 20th Century Fox
- Premiere: Miami International Film Festival, March 12, 2017
- Director: Tom McGrath
- Writer: Michael McCullers
- Runtime: 97 minutes
- Budget: $125 million
- Worldwide gross: $528 million
- Metacritic: 50/100
- Clay Tribune score: 5.0/10
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| March 12, 2017 | Premieres at the Miami International Film Festival |
| March 31, 2017 | Released in the United States by 20th Century Fox |
| Undated in the source | Nominated for Best Animated Feature at the 90th Academy Awards, the Annie Awards, and the Golden Globes |
| Later | The Boss Baby: Back in Business television series |
| Later | The Boss Baby: Back In the Crib television series |
| Later | The Boss Baby: Family Business sequel film |
Baldwin is funny. The Baby Corp mythology is stranger and sadder than the movie deserves.
The Boss Baby is a 5.0 out of 10. It has an unreliable narrator it never doubts, two parents it never uses, and a premise about a baby who will lose everything if he stops performing that it treats as a third-act problem. The sequel and the two series followed the money the first film made. The movie is the weakest version of that idea.
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