The Boss Baby :Family Business. Quick Review.

The original Boss Baby is very much the film it appears to be on the surface. Far from the worst thing ever but extending a one-joke gimmick premise and mining all the expected jokes from it over 90 minutes. Surely it doesn’t need to be thought about a great deal beyond that. Viewers would think so. That said Boss Baby is one of the franchises that’s benefited most from DreamWorks content farm approach to streaming series. So it does makes sense on some level that there would be a made for a theatrical feature-length sequel ( that ironically was a hybrid streaming release in the US.) The question remain’s what do you do? when making a sequel to a first feature that relies heavily on its central gimmick
The answer is that you make a strange, continuity obsessed plot-driven sequel that in some ways loses sight of its target audience. The Templeton brothers have now grown up. Through a series of convoluted plot mechanics they meat a new Boss Baby get shrunk back down and go on an infiltration mission to take down a villain voiced by Jeff Goldblum. Throw in a layer of half baked mid-2000s DreamWorks humour and you’re set to go.
Proceedings honestly feel like a rejected Series of Unfortunate Events or Mysterious Benedict Society plot than a sequel to The Boss Baby. In those cases, the “ kids Wes Anderson” aesthetic has a broad range of appeal to various target audiences. The plot here feels like it wasn’t written with the target audience of under eight in mind. This would be somewhat forgivable if the plot was still engaging. Unfortunately, this is still ultimately a Boss Baby sequel. There’s only so much the creative team can do before reverting to basic slapstick. This viewer has seen all the highs and lows of DreamWorks animation as a studio for the past 17 years. this is a decidedly odd entry in their canon.
The Boss Baby: Family Businesses is very odd. The original film effectively got the most it could out of its gimmick premise. The sequel is far too focused on character and continuity to appeal to kids. Yet this is still ostensibly a boss baby sequel that will not appeal to anyone beyond the under-eights In a way, it’s admirable that the creative team tried to do something different with a central premise that is so thin. That said losing sight of your target audience is never a good thing.
3/10.