107 min | PG | July 2, 2021 | Universal Pictures
Tim and Ted Templeton are grown up and estranged when a magic formula turns them back into a kid and a baby for one more mission. A new Boss Baby in the family needs saving from a tech-guru villain. The premise exists so the first movie can happen again, louder.
Tim Templeton is an adult now. He has a wife and two daughters and a brother he never calls. Ted Templeton runs a hedge fund and answers his phone during family dinners. A formula from Tina, Tim’s infant daughter and a secret Baby Corp agent, reverts the brothers to childhood so they can stop a villain who plans to weaponize children. The film stages all of this as a vehicle for forced reconciliation. Underneath the chase plot it argues that the brothers lost each other to the same grown-up obligations the first film mocked, and it lacks the patience to dramatize that loss instead of narrating it.
Alec Baldwin returns as Ted and reads the baritone boardroom patter on autopilot. The voice that once played against the toddler body now just sounds bored inside it. James Marsden replaces Tobey Maguire as adult Tim and pitches everything at the same anxious, overcaffeinated register. Amy Sedaris voices Tina with a clipped corporate menace that is the only performance doing anything unexpected. Jeff Goldblum plays Dr. Erwin Armstrong, a child-prodigy villain, and coasts on Goldblum cadence without building a character around it. Ariana Greenblatt gives Tabitha, Tim’s older daughter, the one note of real feeling, and the film keeps cutting away from her to stage another gag.
Tom McGrath directs from a script by Michael McCullers, and the two reassemble the original’s machine without finding a new reason for it to run. The animation favors rubber-limbed slapstick and whip-pans that never let a shot hold long enough to land an emotional beat. Hans Zimmer and Steve Mazzaro’s score swells under every reconciliation as if volume can substitute for earned feeling. A holiday-pageant set piece exists only to deliver pratfalls, and the editing cuts on impact rather than meaning. The production design renders Baby Corp as a glossy corporate fantasy and then has nothing to say about it.
The film mistakes acceleration for invention. Every scene races to the next without trusting any single moment to breathe. The time-jump premise promises a story about adults forgetting how to be brothers, then buries that idea under formula gags and a countdown plot. Children will sit through it without complaint. The adults in the room get a sequel that remembers the shape of the first film and none of what made the shape worth filling.