Starring: Alec Baldwin, Steve Buscemi, Jimmy Kimmel, Lisa Kudrow, Patton Oswalt, Miles Bakshi
OUR RATING: ★★★☆☆
Story:
Animated comedy directed by Tom McGrath. The Boss Baby follows seven year-old Tim (Miles Bakshi), whose life is turned upside down upon the arrival of his suit wearing fast-talking, briefcase-carrying baby brother (Alec Baldwin). When Tim goes on a mission to win back the affection of his parents, he finds out about a secret plot by the CEO of Puppy Co., which revolves around his baby brother and threatens to destabilize the balance of love in the world. Both brothers must unite to “save their parents, restore order to the world and prove that love is indeed an infinite force”.
Best Quotes
Adult Tim: Survival of the fittest. It’s the law of the jungle. There’s always someone trying to take what’s yours. How do I know? It almost happened to me.
Tim: My name is Tim. I have the greatest parents ever. It was just the three of us, the Templetons. Life was perfect until that one fateful day.
Mom: Rise and shine.
Dad: It’s take your kid to work day.
Tim: Really?
Mom: Tim, look who’s here.
[she turns and we see she’s holding a baby wearing a suit]
Dad: Meet your new baby brother.
Tim: We need to talk! About the B-A-B-E-E.
Mom: Y, Tim.
Tim: Why? Because he came out of nowhere! We don’t even know him! How can we trust him?
Dad: Come on, he’s just a baby.
Tim: Look at him! He wears a suit!
Mom: I know, it’s it cute? He’s like a little man.
Tim: He carries a briefcase. Does no one else think that’s, oh, I don’t know, a little freaky!
Dad: Well you carried lamb-lamb around until you were like…
Tim: This is not about lamb-lamb.
Mom: All babies are different, Tim.
Dad: And each one is special.
Tim: He’s taking over the whole house!
Mom: [playfully to Boss Baby] Are you taking over the house? Yes, you are. Yes, you are.
Dad: Trust me one day you’re going to get to know this little guy and you are going to love him with all of your heart, just like we do.
Tim: Never!
Baby Boss: We babies are having a crisis, babies aren’t getting as much love as we used to. Behold out mortal enemy. Puppies!
Triplets: Oh, no. That’s awful.
Staci: What is it?
Baby Boss: Well it’s simpler if I just show you.
[he places a talking teddy toy on the coffee table]
Baby Boss: Teddy, if you please.
Teddy: Let’s put on a show. Here we go.
Baby Boss: Jimbo, hit the lights.
[Jimbo drops the lamp which kills the lights]
Baby Boss: You see, babies aren’t getting as much love as we used to.
Staci: Why?
Baby Boss: Behold our mortal enemy!
[he points to a slide with an image of a cute puppy]
Baby Boss: Puppies!
[all the babies “ah” at the cuteness of the puppy]
Baby Boss: No! No! That’s exactly the problem! This is war. Puppies are winning and babies are losing.
Triplet #1: Oh-oh.
Triplet #2: That’s awful.
Triplet #3: That’s bad news, baby.
Staci: What are we going to do?
Baby Boss: You’re going to help me.
Triplet #2: Genius!
Triplet #1: Homerun.
Triplet #3: You still got it, boss.
Staci: Yay!
Baby Boss: Yay.
Baby Boss: Now, your parents all work for Puppy Co, so have you learned anything from them?
Triplet #3: Yes, sir.
Triplet #2: Sure, did.
Triplet #1: Mm-hmm.
Baby Boss: Fantastic. Triplets, go!
Triplet #2: A.
Triplet #1: B.
Triplet #3: C.
Triplet #2: D.
Baby Boss: No, what have you learned about puppies?
[Jimbo claps his hands]
Jimbo: Puppies!
Baby Boss: No, Jimbo! Puppies are evil! Staci, read back the notes.
Staci: I can’t read. What’s it say?
[she turns her notepaper around and we see she’s just drawn some squiggly lines]
Baby Boss: This is my team? A muscle head, a bunch of yes-men, and a doodler.
Triplet #2: Exactly!
Triplet #1: Affirmative.
Baby Boss: [to Jimbo] Put that cookie down!
[Jimbo removes the entire cookie out of his mouth with saliva all over it]
Baby Boss: Cookies are for closers!
Triplets: Parents!
[their parents come into the living room where all the babies are having their meeting]
Dad: Oh, it’s like they’re having their own little meeting.
[all the babies start acting like babies]
Baby Boss: God, this is so humiliating.
[Tim wakes up to hear a man speaking in his baby brother’s room]
Baby Boss: Oh, the usual procedure, sleep deprivation, hunger strikes. They’re very disoriented, but I think the kid might be on to me.
[Tim quietly opens the baby’s bedroom door, turns on the light and yells]
Tim: Hands up, baby!
[we see the baby is talking on the phone]
Baby Boss: Aaah! Poop doody!
[Tim falls down from shock, the baby whispers into the phone]
Baby Boss: I’ve got to deal with the K-I-D.
Tim: You can talk!
Baby Boss: Uh, goo-goo ga-ga.
Tim: No, you can really talk!
Baby Boss: Fine, I can talk. Now let’s see if you can listen. Get me a double espresso and see if there’s some place around here with decent sushi. I’d kill for a spicy tuna roll around about now.
[he walks over to Tim, takes a wad of cash out and throws some into Tim’s face]
Baby Boss: Get yourself a little something.
Tim: Just wait until mom and dad find out about this.
Baby Boss: [falls asleep, snores, then wakes up] Powernap! Uh, you were saying?
Baby Boss: I’m on a mission. There’s not enough love to go around, my job is to find out why. Now get me a double espresso and see if there’s some place around here with decent sushi. I’d kill for a spicy tuna roll around about now.
[he walks over to Tim, takes a wad of cash out and throws some into Tim’s face]
Tim: Who are you?
Baby Boss: Let’s just say I’m the boss.
Tim: The boss? You’re a baby, you wear a diaper!
Baby Boss: Do you know who else wears diapers, astronauts and NASCAR drivers, that’s who. It’s called efficiency, Templeton. The average toddler spends what, forty-five hours a year on the potty. I’m the boss, I don’t have that kind of spare time.
Tim: [referring to the Blackbird song] Stop it! That’s my song, not yours. My parents wrote it just for me.
Boss Baby: Really? Your parents are Lennon and McCartney?
Tim: No, Ted and Janice.
Boss Baby: You don’t even know their names!
Tim: We could share.
Boss Baby: You obviously didn’t go to business school.
Tim: Mom, dad, the baby can talk!
[before Tim can get to his parents, the babies stop in front of him in their toy cars]
Baby Boss: This is war!
Baby Boss: If I don’t succeed in this mission I will live here forever with you!
Tim: Okay, I will help you. But just to get rid of you.
Baby Boss: Deal.
Tim: [as he tries to feed Baby] Here comes the choo-choo train.
Baby Boss: No! No!
Tim: [referring to their parents] They’re watching. Choo-choo.
Baby Boss: Okay.
[as soon as he sees their parents leave them he barfs the food all over Tim’s face]
Baby Boss: Choo-choo on that.
Baby Boss: [as they try to break into Puppy Co] How do we get past the guard?
[we see him wearing a puppy outfit as he crawls to get into Puppy Co]
Baby Boss: I’ve never been so humiliated in my life!
[just then a puppy starts smelling his butt]
Baby Boss: Aargh!
Mom: What’s all the racket?
[we see Tim has dressed Baby into a sailors outfit]
Tim: Isn’t he adorable?
Mom: Oh! I’ve got one for you too!
Tim: What!
Baby Boss: [whispers to Tim] Bummer.
Baby Boss: I can’t do this without you, Tim.
Tim: We do make a pretty good team.
Baby Boss: No, literally, I can’t reach the door knobs.
Tim: What? You’ve never been tickled? What about your parents? I’m sorry, I forgot. You didn’t have parents, did you?
Boss Baby: Tim, I may look like a baby, but I was born all grown up.
Tim: I can’t even imagine not being a kid. You missed out on your whole childhood? You never had someone to love you?
Boss Baby: You can’t miss what you never had.
Trailer:
I did not like how “Lamb Lamb” got stapled and ripped – Lamb Lamb is a stuffed animal by the way and I adore stuffed animals. It made me cry;( I thought there were some parts that were gross too; and gross things put me off my food. There was a disturbing scene that I cannot explain very well involving a creepy costume of a dog with a disturbingly stretched out smile and a big heart on its chest. I am very sensitive by the way. I know most of these things sound negative but in my opinion it was a very negative and unpleasant movie, I hope whoever likes to watch this show changes their mind and decides to watch a movie for smarter kids like the series of unfortunate events which some of you might not know of – look it up it’s very good (it is also an audio book). <3 I am devoted to it.
While the movie has one of the best potential a children movie can ever give, it falls to one of the biggest wasted potential ever.
The biggest problem is that all the potential the movie can offer is wasted on its main conflict, which involves the main characters trying to stop a company from producing something that people will care more than babies, which are puppies that can live forever. While the conflict is decent, it’s under-explored and felt under-researched. You can tell by that the movie just says, “Parents like adorable puppies,” and that’s it, nothing else is talked about the possibility of people getting bored or something, like experimenting it or the chances of getting a disease.
If I were to wrote on the movie, the entire movie would be different in a way. First, the conflict is about the boy trying to get used to his baby brother, who’s simply tasked to become a special agent by growing up with a normal family so he can disguise himself as a family man once he grows up. Second, it will have tons of character development, as the boy learns that his baby brother is still his brother and the fact that he gets the most interesting brother ever while the boss baby decides to learn about being with a family, and world-building, which will explain the backstory of boss baby’s organization and how everything goes, like why boss babies are made sort of thing.
Rating: 2/5