The Boss Baby (2017)

User Review

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  TheMovieDiorama

  5 / 10

  The Boss Baby is unable to balance infancy and adulthood. After the first few minutes, it sprung into my mind that this was incredibly similar to 'Storks'. Imaginatively illustrating where babies come from to create an entertaining animation. What's different with this iteration is that it attempts to blend the lifestyle of a manager with a cute toddler, but doesn't always hit the target. Tim is welcomed by a baby brother who turns out to be a literate boss baby that was hired by a company to prevent people from loving puppies more than babies. A rather creative concept, to mix the stressful life of an office worker with the inadequacy of infancy. It's humorous for the first few minutes, to then stretch the idea for a whole first act before establishing a coherent story grew tedious extremely quickly. Memos, briefcases, money, charts, we get it...it's a baby who bosses people around wearing managerial attire. Baldwin was perfect voice casting for the boss baby whose dead pan delivery sparks the occasional snigger. Yet he is only a small percentage of the voice acting pie chart that I would class as memorable, everyone else was simply just functional. The primary animation style was fine, nothing outstanding, however the style changes when Tim's overly imaginative perspective kicks in to differentiate fantasy from reality. Also liked the pop-up book expositional scene which showcases some innovative animation. The constant film references ('Raiders of the Lost Ark', 'Mary Poppins', 'Lord of the Rings' etc.) may have peaked my interest initially but the overuse of them became detrimental to the comedic script as it rapidly descends into uninspired laziness. The antagonist and primary plot were forgettable and strangely felt pushed aside to focus on developing the relationship between Tim and the boss baby. Fortunately, the last ten minutes pulled in some much needed emotion and rounded the flick off nicely. It's most certainly not the worst animation I've seen, but it feels both imaginative and bland simultaneously. The Elvis impersonators cracked me up though!

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