Mark Reviews Movies: THE BOSS BABY: FAMILY BUSINESS

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Review by Mark Dujsik | July 1, 2021

The Boss Baby: Family Business isn't as weird as its predecessor, which is both slightly disappointing and a relief. It's disappointing, because The Boss Baby was so utterly strange that one almost was rooting for the movie, even as it quickly ran its one-joke premise into the ground and before it copped out with a safely rational ending. There's nothing wrong with "weird," after all, but if a movie is going to go for weird, it really should go for it with wild abandon.

The relief of returning screenwriter Michael McCullers and director Tom McGrath's sequel is that it doesn't exclusively rely on weirdness to carry the material. It's odd enough, for sure, but there's at least some sense that the filmmakers possess conviction about the movie's degree of strangeness. That doesn't necessarily make this a good movie by any stretch of the imagination, but it does make the follow-up much more tenable and digestible—and even a bit funny, which makes it vastly superior to the original.

The good news is that the cop-out of the ending wasn't quite the evasive maneuver that it seemed. Yes, Tim Templeton (voice of James Marsden) is all grown up in some ways, with a family of his own, but he's still the hyper-imaginative kid he always was at heart. The whole thing with his younger brother Theodore (voice of Alec Baldwin) being a "boss baby" wasn't just a bedtime story for his daughter Tabitha (voice of Ariana Greenblatt), either.

Theodore is now an adult and inordinately wealthy in his role as a workaholic CEO, which has led to the two brothers' estrangement. Meanwhile, Tim is a stay-at-home dad, taking care of Tabitha and new baby Tina (voice of Amy Sedaris), while his wife Carol (voice of Eva Longoria) works. Tina, by the way, is the proof that all of Tim's story about a baby Theodore and Baby Corp. wasn't just his imagination. The new baby is a boss baby, too, and she needs her father and uncle's help to put a stop to another threat to all of baby-kind.

The plot has to do with a specialty school—one that Tabitha attends. It's run by Dr. Armstrong (voice of Jeff Goldblum), who believes that babies aren't the future. They could be the present, capable of doing so much more than adults give them credit.

They could be learning leadership and management instead of the alphabet. They could be working instead of playing. They could be the ones in charge of the world, instead of the adults who have mucked it up so thoroughly.

Baby Corp. wants to stop his plan, because it could mean the end of the joys of babyhood. In order for her father and uncle to infiltrate the school, Tina gives Tim and Theodore a special formula that de-ages them: Tim becomes a kid again, and Theodore becomes a baby.

All of this, of course, is multiple degrees of silly, but again, there's some charm to that characteristic. The school, a technologically advanced center for learning, offers some quirky gags (a classroom that looks more like the set of a game show and a time-out capsule, where naughty students are lulled into submission by new-age music). A secret underground lair has babies working like those proverbial monkeys accidentally typing out Shakespeare—only that they're coding disposable but highly addictive cellphone apps.

The villain has a secret, too, and Goldblum's vocal performance is so energetically invested that it adds yet another layer to the story's weirdness. It obviously gave the animators working on the character plenty of inspiration, since the character, in both its forms, possesses a gangly, rubbery physicality that's worth a few chuckles.

The setup, in other words, is an actual setup, unlike the previous movie, and, if one at least accepts that all of this is and is intended to be wackily irrational, fairly entertaining. The story also gives some time to the troubled relationship between the brothers and to Tim's fear that Tabitha is outgrowing his flights of fancy. Because McCullers' screenplay (once again based on the books by Marla Freeze) isn't just about a one-joke gimmick, there's some sincerity to these relationships.

All of this is relatively speaking, of course, and because the first movie set such a low bar for matters of plot and characters and any kind of grounding, the sequel at least feels as if it possesses a legitimate story. On the flip side, the filmmakers are far too often distracted from that story by an apparent need to keep everything moving with heightened pace and kineticism. Over-the-top and sometimes destructive action sequences serve both as a nuisance and to undermine the movie's occasionally good-hearted nature.

It's a bit too messy (and far too busy), but at least The Boss Baby: Family Business isn't the mess that its predecessor was. The improvements here are more than baby steps, at least.

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