As a character, Boss Baby is like an executive knockoff of Stewie, and though his lines aren’t as witty or adult scandalous, as long as you’re chuckling at his autocratic bravura, the movie is amusing enough.īut here’s what’s a little weird and overly complicated about it. Back in 1989 and ’90, the critics were never too kind to the “Look Who’s Talking” films - they were held in contempt - but this critic, for one, found them more funny than not, and there is of course one fantastic talking baby in popular culture: the snobbish, irascible, hilariously merciless Stewie on “Family Guy” - the purest expression of Seth MacFarlane’s id on that show. “The Boss Baby” was loosely inspired by Marla Frazee’s 2010 children’s book, and if the movie had simply had been a feature-length “Look Who’s Talking” riff about a tyrannical baby who’s running the household like a corporate titan (a perfect metaphor, of course, for how the parents of a newborn feel - he really is the boss), it might have been a perfect throwaway hoot. The character, who is never called anything but Boss Baby, is a kick to look at, with a blockish head that’s nearly as tall as his body, and he gets to bark out a lot of lines like “Where’s HR when you need ’em?” or (upon being told that he hates someone) “Hate is a strong word.

The title character is an insanely precocious, arrogant, walking-and-talking infant who dresses in a black business suit, carries a briefcase, has big marble eyes that narrow down to devious slits, and snaps out observations and demands in the mellifluous cutthroat voice of Alec Baldwin, who has a peerless gift for making bombs-away statements that don’t raise his pulse by a beat. You may wind up wishing that it had been one or the other. “ The Boss Baby,” the jokey new 3D animated lark from DreamWorks Animation (it’s being distributed by 20th Century Fox), is a visually brisk, occasionally clever low-concept comedy that’s also trying, half-heartedly, to be some sort of Pixarish masterpiece. Every so often, though, you may want a movie to be a little dumber - to be true to what it actually is.

It’s a routine feeling to want a movie to be smarter.

The boss movie