It then doesn’t help that the imagined mythos of The Boss Baby is convoluted and mechanical.
It’s hard to invest when what you are watching is one 97-minute flight of fantasy. Rather than just invent a world where a baby can be a talking business hard-ass (in the way Family Guy gives no explanations for Stewie), what we are watching is all in Tim’s head, so immediately the action is at arm’s length. As set up in a slick opening ten minutes, Tim is a kid with a sprightly imagination - dinner is a jungle adventure, going downstairs a voyage under the sea - and the arrival of the new baby is parlayed as a hostile corporate takeover. Yet the way The Boss Baby engages with the idea is distancing rather than engaging. There is an obvious metaphor at the heart of the story that parents will recognise: babies enter the family business and start running the household like a megalomaniac tycoon, disrupting routines, wielding whims and displacing old-timers, in this case seven-year-old big brother Tim, now relegated in his parents’ priorities. The Boss Baby is hopped up on energy but never harnesses it effectively.
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