Movie Thoughts: The Boss Baby (2017)

• Released: 31 March 2017
• Directed by: Tom McGrath
• Running time: 1 h 37 min
• Rating 3/5

Synopsis

After a baby takes over his and his parents' life, a boy named Tim and said Boss Baby must work together in order to return things to the way they were. 

My Thoughts

Remember how I said in my Trolls review that I missed out on some Dreamworks movies as I was getting older and honestly grew disinterested in most of their projects sans How to Train Your Dragon and Kung Fu Panda? Yeah, I didn't just miss out on that one. Mr. Peabody & Sherman, Turbo, The Penguins of Madagascar, Home, etc., I missed all those. Well, them and Boss Baby, which I'll be looking at today. I've heard some good things about it, some less good things. Let's see how well it does.

So, this being a big-budget Dreamworks animated film, of course it looks great. The animation is wonderful and the characters are all well-designed. I particularly enjoyed the imagination sequences, where things got to be really colorful and creative. However, I do have one complaint, and that's on the eyes. The pupils of these characters are permanently dilated, making them look enormous. This just kind of makes them look like they're consistently high or something. I get that it was to make them look cute, but it's honestly kind of unsettling. I'd love to be able to see a little more iris, thanks.

I also appreciate that we don't really know how much of this movie was imagined by Tim. Yes, the colorful imagination sequences obviously were fake, but I don't think it's far fetched to say that a lot of the whole Boss Baby plot may be an exaggeration as well. Things, of course, get delightfully over the top, so yeah, more of it may be "fake" than it seems.

With this being a very baby-centric kids movie, however, also come some downsides. I personally really don't like babies that much, and I'd never want one, so the fact that this movie is filled to the top with baby jokes and baby things isn't too appealing for me (honestly, it's one of the things that turned me off from watching it in the first place). So, yeah, with that comes a lot of baby stuff, especially the humor. If you don't like stuff like potty jokes, emeto jokes, fart jokes, etc. wasn't very neat.

There's also of course the cliché fallout between the main characters before the climax. Like, though they weren't amazing protagonists, I genuinely liked the bond Tim and the Boss Baby develop throughout the movie. But of course they had to have the obvious "I say something really insensitive" "I give up on you"-bit, and it hardly even lasted long. This was just a rather annoying part of the movie.

The twist villain was an okay one. I'm not big on those, but I guess he didn't do his job horribly since he was revealed as a bad guy pretty early on, and decently built up. 

I wouldn't say that The Boss Baby is a great film, but it has its moments. The bond between the main characters is pretty genuine and if you can get past the high amount of baby jokes it's a pretty decent flick. It's got some pretty visuals to say the least.