The Boss Baby: Family Business (2021 | USA | 107 minutes | Tom McGrath)
In the halcyon days of 2018, this tweet came across my feed and my brain had no idea how to process it so it just melted down:
No one’s hyper-online bingo card includes a square for “Almost eighty year old economist talks about a Boss Baby movie with smartass podcasters.” Yet, here we are and I eagerly accepted the chance to write about the lessons of late capitalism we can learn from the second Boss Baby movie, Family Business. And there are some!
Alas, something other than my brain melted when I watched the sequel as my screener was good for a three-day span that perfectly synced with the three hottest days in Seattle’s recorded history. But we still push our way through because we’re all professionals here who promised content.
In the first movie, Tim Templeton (voiced by James Marsden) is a precocious seven year old whose baby brother (voiced by Alec Baldwin) behaves and talks like a captain of industry when his parents aren’t around. This time, Tim is a father with daughters, Tabitha (voiced by Ariana Greenblatt) and Tina (voiced by Amy Sedaris), the latter assumes the role of Boss Baby.
God help us, we don’t just have another Boss Baby, but a Girlboss Baby.
The plot is a doozy, so I’m just going to quote the Wikipedia entry:
[Tim] hears something coming from infant daughter Tina’s room. When he goes to investigate, he discovers that Tina is a Boss Baby, just as Ted once was, and that she has been assigned to get Ted there for a special mission. Tim refuses to call, saying that he will never come, and encourages Tina to go back to sleep. However, Tina uses snippets of her bear Connie’s recording capabilities to leave a false voicemail for Ted by saying that Tabitha has fallen off of the pony he gave her, Precious.
Tim wakes up the next morning to find a concerned Ted at his front door. When it is revealed that the voicemail was a ruse to lure him here, Ted tries to leave; but Tabitha begs him to stay for the holidays and gives him a kiss on the cheek, angering Tim. Ted, Tim, and Tina all go into the kitchen, where Tim tries to explain that Tina is a Boss Baby and Ted just doesn’t remember that he was one, too. As they start to argue, Tina reveals herself as a Boss Baby and gives them both pacifiers.
Ted, Tina, and Tim are projected to BabyCorp, where it is revealed that the founder of Tabitha’s school, Dr. Armstrong (voiced by Jeff Goldbum), is training kids to forget their childhood and grow up too fast, which is why Tabitha has been so distant. Tina introduces the brothers to a new formula that BabyCorp has developed that will allow them to turn back into kids for 48 hours so they can infiltrate the school undercover and figure out what Armstrong is really up to by planting listening devices in his office.
Dr. Armstrong is, to be clear, a real bastard. He tries to get children to code apps for him around the clock, instead of all that playing around nonsense that can’t be monetized. Or maybe he’s just more of a moderate. The Supreme Court did just rule 8-1 two weeks ago that exploiting child labor in African cocoa fields at the behest of American corporations is perfectly legal.
I’m glad this Boss Baby takes the bold stance against forced child labor, but most of the movie made me cringe. There was a “performance anxiety” joke that didn’t land. All of the humor felt stale and outdated or predictable.
I wanted to enjoy the movie a lot more than I actually did. I thought being somewhere demographically between elderly economist and smartass podcaster, this would be closer to my wheelhouse than it actually was.
I read an essay the other day saying that the era of the girlboss is over, and it looks like the girlboss baby era may have even less staying power.
It’s a shame.
The Boss Baby: Family Business is now playing in theaters and streaming on Peacock.