Reviews of Movies I Haven't Seen Yet: The Boss Baby: Family Business
The Final Boss of Baby Movies
When The Boss Baby came out in 2017, it was a game-changer. There had been movies about bosses, and there had been movies about babies, but this was the first time the two concepts had been combined in such an exhilaratingly direct way.
The Boss Baby: Family Business takes the baton passed from the first movie and keeps the franchise alive by twisting the formula, making the Boss Baby-verse a darker, grittier, more frightening place. No movie series can stay fresh without regularly reinventing itself, and the sequel’s brutal riff on organised crime and sexual politics stuns as often as it amuses.
The setup is simple enough: thirty years in the future, climate change has transformed vast tracts of the earth into barren deserts, and bloody wars are fought worldwide over water supplies. Grown-up Timmy Templeton and his brother Ted, who had grown apart over the years due to Timmy’s growing attachment to the Qanon movement, are forced to work together when a new Boss Baby (Ariana Greenblatt) shows up and begins murdering former presidents one by one.
Few animated films dare to tackle the big issues in such a bold manner. Fewer still feature over half an hour of full frontal nudity in a ninety-minute runtime. But The Boss Baby: Family Business is not about shock for shock’s sake: amid the explosions, graphic sex, torture scenes and dystopian gang warfare is a deep message: Be Yourself.
The cast is almost uniformly excellent - Alec Baldwin delivers by updating his Baby Ted character with a Chinese accent that in lesser hands would jar but here seems appropriate, Greenblatt is suitably evil, and James Marsden as Tim portrays a man’s descent into madness perfectly. The only exception is Jeff Goldblum as the sinister “Dr Armstrong”, who was allowed to improvise his lines and consequently says nothing for the whole movie except direct quotes from the What Katy Did series. A rare misstep from Goldblum, whose conversion to the Baha’i faith while filming Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom has clearly not come without its problems.
The Boss Baby: Family Business is not your average cartoon, but that’s all to the better. Not one to take your grandparents to, or anyone offended by multi-directional blasphemy, but a modern classic for those who like their animation to make them think as well as cry.