One approaches The Boss Baby: Family Business much like its 2017 sibling: One acknowledges the inherent strangeness of its talking-baby power structure premise while finding the adventure story framework utterly disposable. The earlier film established the rules of its universe, in which babies are not the product of procreation but heavenly beings chosen either to be a parent’s pride and joy or to be an office worker (listen, it doesn’t make any sense, just roll with it), a streaming series continued that story and now a theatrical sequel ignores the events of the series in favor of plot consolidation. If this sounds familiar, it’s because DreamWorks Animation, the studio behind the project, did exactly this with the recent Spirit Untamed, which likewise repackaged the narrative of a series spun-off from its predecessor. It’s not an exciting prospect for the future of animation. As loud and repetitive as a bratty toddler, this rehashed sequel is as lazy as its predecessor.
There was a lot more about the first movie that was strange: for instance, the extended climax turned the villain into an infant and then tried to redeem him in some convoluted way. It didn’t work as an attempt to give the movie a heart, and this sequel falls short in similar ways. One big change is that the hero doesn’t narrate the events. Tobey Maguire narrated The Boss Baby and now James Marsden voices the grown-up Tim, sent as a regular baby to his parents (Jimmy Kimmel and Lisa Kudrow). His brother Ted (Alec Baldwin) was a Boss Baby, an agent with BabyCorp, but the events of the previous movie’s climax allowed him to grow into an adult as well. Now, the adult Ted is a hedge fund manager, and Tim enjoys a quiet grown-up life with his family: wife Carol (Eva Longoria) and daughters Tabitha (Ariana Greenblatt) and Tina (Amy Sedaris).
In case the casting of Tina didn’t give it away, yes, BabyCorp has sent a Boss Baby into Tim’s household. She’s on a reconnaissance mission to weed out nefarious goings-on at her sister’s school, where Tabitha is preparing for a big performance and battling nerves. \Dr. Erwin Armstrong (Jeff Goldblum) runs the institution, and seeks revenge upon BabyCorp for a perceived injustice. His idea of revenge is to create an app that will enslave parents to do his bidding. Of course, he also harbors a secret that’s all too easy to guess.
It’s as dull as it sounds, and the few moments of sincerity that really work – basically anything involving Tabitha, voiced with surprising naturalism by Greenblatt – are entirely perfunctory to returning director Tom McGrath, once again working from a screenplay by Michael McCullers. Otherwise, it leads to a lot of action without a convincing reason for it and explanation of the plot details without an engine to drive them. The Boss Baby: Family Business isn’t interested in anything resembling a genuine family dynamic. It simply takes the idea of the first movie and plugs it into a slightly different plot.
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