Shame the film is too hyperactive to find them.Many years after the events of The Boss Baby, Tim (James Marsden) and Ted (Alec Baldwin) are all grown up. There are laughs and heart buried in this idea somewhere. The Boss Baby is hopped up on energy but never harnesses it effectively. It’s a scattershot approach that informs the entire film. As is the DreamWorks way, it also features some of the most random referencing, from The Apartment to Raiders to The Six Million Dollar Man. In places, it has visual panache, some fun gags (a charming talcum powder fart joke) and delivers an exciting set-piece in a garden chase scored to the ’70s cop show S.W.A.T.
Cue an unfunny break-in into a pet expo, a baddie who wants to destroy the world, a magic formula that keeps people from growing up and obvious messaging about the need for sharing and love. As Tim realises The Boss Baby will leave when he completes the mission, the film becomes a buddy picture as the mismatched duo put differences aside to find the Forever Puppy. The Boss Baby is on a mission from Baby Corp, the (visually splendid) heavenly factory where all infants come from, to uncover new intel on Forever Puppy, an engineered everlasting pooch designed to divert the love away from children. It then doesn’t help that the imagined mythos of The Boss Baby is convoluted and mechanical. It’s hard to invest when what you are watching is one 97-minute flight of fantasy. Rather than just invent a world where a baby can be a talking business hard-ass (in the way Family Guy gives no explanations for Stewie), what we are watching is all in Tim’s head, so immediately the action is at arm’s length. As set up in a slick opening ten minutes, Tim is a kid with a sprightly imagination - dinner is a jungle adventure, going downstairs a voyage under the sea - and the arrival of the new baby is parlayed as a hostile corporate takeover. Yet the way The Boss Baby engages with the idea is distancing rather than engaging. There is an obvious metaphor at the heart of the story that parents will recognise: babies enter the family business and start running the household like a megalomaniac tycoon, disrupting routines, wielding whims and displacing old-timers, in this case seven-year-old big brother Tim, now relegated in his parents’ priorities.
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