It’s a real stinker!

The Fate of the Furious

STARRING: Alec Baldwin, Steve Buscemi, Jimmy Kimmel

DIRECTOR: Tom McGrath 

Genre: Animation 

Rating: PG

98 mins

It’s a golden era for animated movies, with Disney, Pixar and DreamWorks firing out quality productions left, right and centre. Unfortunately, the latter studio’s latest film, The Boss Baby, will not be joining the pantheon of greats. In fact, if it’s even remembered next week it will be a fine achievement.

The film focuses on a seemingly innocent new-born (voiced by Alex Baldwin) who’s secretly a business-savvy worker for Babycorp, located in Heaven. It’s a paper-thin premise and stretches even thinner as the narratives proceeds to ride on the short-lived amusement of this one gag for the entirety of the run-time.

Events begin with Tim (voiced by Miles Christopher Bakshi), an imaginative seven-year-old boy living with just his mum and dad (voiced by Lisa Kudrow and Jimmy Kimmel) when we first meet him.

We’re quickly taken through a tour of Tim’s daily life in the opening of the film, which mostly involves him using his overactive imagination to imagine a bath as an underwater adventure, or a backyard BBQ as a showdown against some hungry apes. Then every night his parents read him three bedtime stories, sing him their rendition of Blackbird and tuck him in for bed.

To Tim, this is the definition of a perfect life; just him and his parents. So when they ask Tim one night if he’d want a baby brother, he replies: “No, thanks. I’m enough,” and goes to bed seemingly unaware that his Mum is pregnant, even despite the obvious belly she’s sporting.

From there, Tim’s life is quickly thrown into disarray by the arrival of his new brother, the eponymous character, who shows up via taxi on his suburban street and wears a mini business suit every day and night. Tim quickly begins to wonder if his parents are falling out of love with him, as they spend more and more time ‘raising’ their new arrival, and seemingly forgetting all about Tim and his beloved nightly routines.

There’s also a really convoluted and nonsensical plot involving the rival CEO of Puppycorp (voiced by Steve Buscemi) who apparently is planning on creating a new kind of puppy that will make people want to stop having babies forever. No one seems to bat an eyelid that this could be considered some form of genocide, or appears remotely horrified at the prospect.

Unfortunately, The Boss Baby is one of those snarky animations that desperately wants to appeal to parents as well as kids, but its snappy, pop-culture-referencing script feels forced to death (there’s a running joke about Gandalf that’s bafflingly unfunny). Undemanding kids might get a kick out of its jazzy, restless visual style and poo jokes, but grown-ups may well find themselves taking some impromptu nap time.

The Boss Baby runs at a breakneck speed, and even its pauses are stuffed and filled to the brim with little mini-sequences and moments. It gets very frustrating and too many unnecessary detours ruin what could have been salvageable from this mess.

To be honest, the movie never stops feeling like a feature-length film that should have been one of those cute 10-minute shorts that proceed major animation releases. It coasts on the inherent joke of its premise for as long as it can, failing to serve up any amusing results, before trying to fill in the rest of its running time with metaphors, subplots, and twists that just don’t make very much sense.

At its best, The Boss Baby is a movie about a little boy learning to understand that not everything is always going to be about him, and the ways he tries to fight against the harsh reality of that.

The only problem is that director Tom McGrath handles this with about as much subtlety as The Incredible Hulk. From the man who made Madagascar, he should have known better than to pepper the film with nothing but noticeably subpar moments and emotional beats that are too complicated and nonsensical to ring true in any way.

The results only become less convincing and increasingly more annoying as time goes on.

Avoid this one like a soiled nappy. 

l Showing in: Cineco, Seef II, Wadi Al Sail, Saar, Al Jazeera, Dana, Novo, Mukta A2

Rating: 1/5