

And projections heading into the weekend had flop written all over it.

It didn't look bad enough to make it on my end of year worst list, but it didn't look good enough for me to care. In fact, I really hated this movie.īeing perfectly honest, I almost skipped this movie. Some are saying it isn't as bad as it looks.

Rarely have I ever sat through a DreamWorks while writhing in pain, hoping it would end and put me out of my misery. Never have I walked up to the ticket booth at a theater and been embarrassed to ask for a ticket to a DreamWorks movie. But they've hit a new all-time low here with "The Boss Baby." Never have I watched a trailer for a DreamWorks movie and thought it looked like absolute trash.

So them making a bad movie is nothing too surprising. I mean, they started out with "Antz" and scattered between their great movies are movies like "Shark Tale," "Flushed Away," "Bee Movie," the endless amounts of sequels in the "Madagascar" and "Shrek" franchises as well as nearly everything they've done in the last five years with a few minor exceptions. Yeah, they've made some phenomenal movies like the ones I've mentioned, but they've never been consistent. What in the world has happened to DreamWorks Animation? OK, in fairness, DreamWorks has never really been on Pixar level when it comes to animation. That nobody involved in the production even bothered to suggest that this entire scenario sounded a little forced indicates everyone was too busy laughing at gags involving infants twisting each other’s nipples and uttering phrases like “performance anxiety.From the studio that brought you "Shrek," "How to Train Your Dragon," "Kung Fu Panda" and "Megamind" now gives us. She fools adult hedge-fund guy Ted (Baldwin) into traveling to the suburban Templeton home by way of the same cassette-deck trick Tim used in the first film (this is some lazy writing, as you’ll learn if you ever try to buy a cassette deck) and then gives the brothers a formula that reverts them to babyhood and boyhood, so they can infiltrate a parent-upending school headed by a sinister pedagogue voiced by Jeff Goldblum. In the first movie he guided us through a narrative in which his seven-year-old self was bedeviled by a younger brother who talked and wore a suit and was up to something with a company called “Bab圜orp.” Now Tim’s a dad and one of his own kids, infant Tina, voiced by Amy Sedaris, is pulling the Boss Baby strings, in the name of gender equity in second-rate animated entertainments. James Marsden’s adult Tim Templeton here spins another tale. oh never mind).įour years is a pretty long gestation time for a sequel to an unworthy hit, and from the very onset of “The Boss Baby: Family Business” you can see how hard a time the movie’s creative team, such as it is, had coming up with a workable story line. The movie did well enough to spawn a sequel, “Superbabies: Baby Geniuses 2,” starring Jon Voight and Scott Baio and hence something like a cinematic advance man for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.Ģ017’s “ The Boss Baby” seemed like, and likely really was, something of an automatic pilot move for DreamWorks Animation: A talking baby in a suit! being a CEO! (speaking of Donald Trump), voiced by Alec Baldwin! (speaking of Donald Trump) and packed with a lot of filled-diaper jokes (speaking of. Of course, Premiere did not put “Baby Geniuses” on the cover and of course now the movie is best known as an adjunct punchline to Paul Rudd’s immortal “Mac and Me” bit on “Late Night with Conan O'Brien.”īUT.
