The Boss Baby: Family Business movie review — Thoroughly predictable affair for easy laughs

Language: English

The most remarkable thing about The Boss Baby: Family Business is that it exists. The film is a direct sequel to The Boss Baby (based on Marla Frazee’s picture book of the same name) from 2017, with Alec Baldwin voicing the titular protagonist, a precocious, CEO-like infant who works for ‘BabyCorp,’ a covert organisation that monitors threats to babies across the world.

The gag is that the Boss Baby (otherwise known as Theodore ‘Ted’ Templeton) behaves like an adult when the adults are not looking, a fact that drives his seven-year-old brother Tim (Miles Bakshi) up the wall. The premise felt cute for about 10 minutes, which is what it should have been, to be honest: a punchy short film that leant into the surrealism of its foundational concept before the fun ran out.

And yet, we have The Boss Baby: Family Business (not to mention, a whole-ass Netflix series about Ted’s exploits at BabyCorp). This time around, we see Ted (Baldwin) and Tim (James Marsden) as middle-aged men negotiating regular, middle-age life situations: Ted, ever the corporate ninja, barely has a moment to himself, let alone for his brother. Tim, father to eight-year-old Tabitha and infant Tina, worries that his elder daughter is growing up way too fast, and behaving in a surprisingly grown-up manner already — much like Ted did, all those years ago.

The hijinks begin when Tina (voiced by Amy Sedaris, who also lent her voice to the inimitable Princess Carolyn in the Netflix series BoJack Horseman ) is revealed to be the next Boss Baby in the family; another wisecracking, precocious infant with the gift of gab. And she needs her Uncle Ted’s help on the mission assigned to her by BabyCorp; investigating the rogue school principal Erwin Armstrong (Jeff Goldblum), who turns out to be a baby-in-disguise plotting to rid the world of all grown-ups.

At the end of the day, parents are just big ol’ little ‘uns: this is the narrative hand that rocks the cradle for The Boss Baby: Family Business. When Tina takes Ted to BabyCorp again after all these years, he tells her excitedly, “Take it from me: you have to be aggressive if you wanna get ahead and climb that corporate ladder, until you’re the last baby standing on top!” Tina, who is after all the Gen-Z Boss Baby, replies: “Actually, I prioritise a healthy work-life balance and a positive environment where my ideas are valued.”

This is an unexpectedly knowing moment of satire (one of many in this movie, actually): it points towards the fact that the whole conversation around ‘work-life balance’ has, in fact, been hijacked by corporate interests. The ‘balance’ in question, propagated and reinforced by popular culture, is designed to benefit your employers — it has become a bigger, more elaborate version of ‘team bonding exercises’ cherished by Human Resource departments everywhere. It puts the onus of uninterrupted, breathless productivity back onto the individual employee, while strategically saying nothing about the working conditions that led to the ‘imbalance’ in the first place.

Generally, however, this is a film that plays it safe and moves at far too breathless a pace (it is intended for the seven-10 demographic, after all) to allow contemplative moments.

There is baby formula humour, plus the obligatory incontinence jokes every now and then — exactly one of these is funny, when Tina tells Uncle Ted that her ‘magic potion’ that transforms adults into babies for 48 hours might have “some side effects.” Cut to a bottle label that basically reels off the ‘symptoms’ of infancy: mood swings, poop-filled diapers, and intense attachment issues.

The voice cast does a tidy job, for the most part, with Baldwin and Marsden doing well as adults this time around (Marsden replaces Toby Maguire, who provided the adult Tim voice-over in the first movie). Goldblum is gleefully evil in a role that is right up his alley, alternately diabolical and whimsical. But it is the reliably brilliant Sedaris who steals the show as Tina, the new Boss Baby.

Sedaris’ strong, malleable voice lends an extra edge of vulnerability to proceedings. Her Princess Carolyn character from BoJack Horseman was an exceedingly well-rounded portrayal of how the corporate world can chew up and spit out women — Carolyn is no weakling, and she pushes back admirably throughout the show. But at what cost, the show asks us constantly. Tina does feel like a younger, unencumbered version of Princess Carolyn at times, but this is a children’s movie at the end of the day, and so the character’s abrasive edges are filed off smoothly, efficiently.

The Boss Baby: Family Business is thoroughly predictable fare that is not above gunning for the easy laugh. But if you are indeed parent to an infant (precocious or not), you will know that predictable movies are frequently the need of the hour.

The Boss Baby: Family Business is now available in Indian cinemas.   Rating: ** Watch the trailer here

Aditya Mani Jha is a Delhi-based independent writer and journalist, currently working on a book of essays on Indian comics and graphic novels