The Boss Baby: Family Business Really Keeps it in the Family

The Boss Baby: Family Business (2021)

The Boss Baby: Family Business is a follow-up to 2017 surprise family hit, The Boss Baby. Alec Baldwin returns to lead the cast to bring the audience back to the world in which a secret baby corporation directs society from the shadows, but this time, instead of saving all of baby-kind, the script is flipped as the kids save the parents from Jeff Goldblum's excellent villain. This isn’t a spoiler, since it is established in the exposition and the plot beats follow from there. It is a remarkably simple storyline, relying in its cast and surface level comedy to carry the movie. While it is mostly cute, the humor is wanting. Essentially, every person who laughed at the Progressive Beach Day commercial before the movie, thoroughly enjoyed the jokes. For the more discerning or disturbed audience member, the movie elicits little more than a few chuckles. The Boss Baby: Family Business tries to be as safe as possible and it is almost completely successful.

While it plays it very safe, there were a few dangling plot threads that bother me. The first of which is the villain. Jeff Goldblum’s character runs an elite school that pushes students academically, which it implies forces students to grow up too fast. It is heavily exaggerated so that the second graders are learning calculus, chemistry, and basic mechanics of combustion engines. This created two problems. One of which is that the calculus they showed was wrong. A character was asked “x is equal to the derivative of?” and the student answered “um, itself.” And they acted like that was correct, which it isn’t. X is the derivative of half the second power of x. I’m going to be honest, that I was furious and completely removed from the movie for a solid ten minutes, and I probably missed some more jokes as I dwelled on the how the screenwriters were too lazy to double-check with anyone with the most foundational understanding of calculus. That is honestly one of the first things that a calculus student learns, and it is embarrassing that they got it wrong. Clearly, the writers did not attend a prestigious early childhood learning center. The second problem with making the school the enemy is that there are too many stupid parents that think that schools are indoctrinating children by teaching critical thinking and facts, that this movie will be used as ammunition in the new war on thinking. The movie does state that not all schools are bad, but it is in a throwaway line that is buried between two jokes. Intelligent and discerning parents will not have a problem separating the movie with the talking babies from reality, but we all know some parents that will leave the theater thinking “Even that liberal stooge Alec Baldwin agrees that schools are indoctrinatin’ out kids”.

While the implication about the school is largely a societal problem, the final issue I have with the movie is by far the darkest. The older brother from the original Boss Baby has a family and one of his daughters is an executive at Baby Corp. and the other attends the problematic school. When he is de-aged, he is the same age as his older daughter and reverse Marty McFly’s her. He just straight up leads on his daughter, then she finds out he is her dad, and the implications of this obvious Electra Complex are not dealt with. The movie does not shy away from the fact that she is crushing on her dad and it is even a focal point for a musical number, which was cute on the surface, but horrifying when you realize they are father and daughter.

The movie did try its best, but I wish that I had not seen it or at least just stayed home and watched it on Peacock. It wasn’t bad, but I really can’t get over the bad math nor the incestual undertones, and not in that order. The good news is that young kids will not realize any of these issues, but it will be hard for the parents to ignore (except the calculus). At face value, it is a fun, a little too family friendly, summer animated feature that will occupy a kid for 2 hours. Under the surface, it is an animated comedy that plays for cheap laughs and doesn’t care enough to take the implications of its plot points seriously. I tried to enjoy it, but it is gnawing at my brain. I give The Boss Baby: Family Business, the derivative of x (1) out of the derivative of half of the second power of x evaluated at 100 (100).