Baby
Geniuses (1/2
star)
review by Jon
Waterman
Ok, get this. Babies are big business. Two sinister scientists
are trying to harness the superior intelligence of the baby
race so they can exploit it and all the technological advances
that come with it. At the same time, a privately owned day
care center dad is working on trying to figure out baby speak,
because he also believes that they have superior intellect.
He has no ulterior motive. Here’s the kicker. The main
mean scientist and the dad are related. Oh, and get this. The
dad’s son has a twin (unbeknownst to them) that is part
of the scientist’s experiments. Sounds believable so
far, so what’s the problem?
You know what. As much as it sounds like crap, the premise
isn’t all that terrible. There’s an interesting
story in the idea of babies holding a collective unconscious
surpassing adults that’s inaccessible do to a language
barrier. And when the babies learn to talk to adults, they “cross
over” and lose all their knowledge. It’s far-fetched,
but sounds like it could be something. What makes it so horrible
is the way it is presented, with evil scientists and martial
arts action and so on.
The film is meant as a family comedy, but here too it fails.
It’s great to laugh at, but not how the filmmakers intended.
How director Bob Clark can go from something so great as “A
Christmas Story” to something so nauseating as this is
beyond me. He teamed up with Greg Michael (lifelong second
unit director on crappy movies) to pen the myriad “diaper
gravy” references and to throw in some creepy baby sex
humor in there for the adults. What were they thinking? Insinuating
that babies had sex in a stroller as an oblivious adult taxied
this other kid around is just sick and wrong.
Never mind that. That’s not the only creepy thing in
the movie. There’s also this giant animatronic giant
baby (that’s part of some theme park the scientists open)
that would scare some kids more than clowns. But mostly the
creep factor comes from the horrible looking computer generated
talking babies. It just looks weird. The new lips sometimes
float around awkwardly and sometimes the skin tones don’t
match. It looks bad. I understand the need to have a group
of talking babies in a film called “Baby Geniuses,” but
put a little effort into it. Kids can tell a product this shoddy
when they see it, too. Also in the fighting scenes, the head
of the baby that’s placed over the fighting stand in
is much worse. It looks like the head is about to pop off.
By the way, evidently being a super genius means you have
super strength. The opening scene is our main character fighting
off security guards and winning. I guess no one tells the other
babies they can rule the school, because they all basically
just sit around and talk about stuff. They never explain how
the one kid’s physical capabilities surpass that of the
adults. They don’t explain a lot of things.
This movie is one big heaping pile of diaper gravy.
respond to jon@filmbrats.com
|