Cast:
Jon Voight (Bill Biscane/Kane), Scott Baio (Stan Bobbins), Vanessa Angel (Jean Bobbins), Skyler Shaye (Kylie), Leo, Connor and Christopher Lewis (Baby Kahuna), Justin Chatwin (Zack), Peter Wingfield (Crowe), Shaun Sipos (Brandon), Thomas Kretschmann (Roscoe), Stefanie von Pfetten (Jennifer Kraft), with Gerry and Myles Fitzgerald (Kahuna; voiced by David A. Kaye), Max and Michael Iles (Archie; voiced by Danny McKinnon), Jared and Jordan Scheideman (Finkleman (voiced by Jonathan Singleton), Maia and Keana Bastidas (Rosita (voiced by Melissa Montoya), and Joshua and Maxwell Lockhart (Alex; voiced by Rashad Hood) Directed by Bob Clark (#020 - A Christmas Story, #679 - Black Christmas, #1055 - Porky's, #1854 - My Summer Story, #2149 - Baby Geniuses)
Review:
There really is no point in saying the obvious, but the original Baby Geniuses (1999) was a semi-success with audiences despite its ungodly idea of having babies that talk with mouth morphing. The only souls alive that really wanted another of these films must've loved the power of the dollar and also thought audiences really would be stupid enough to go with it a second time. You might remember that the genesis for what became the first film was partially at the hands of Jon Voight, who had sprung the idea of a script that had been done about intelligent babies, and that Voight showed a proof-of-concept film about babies sitting around talking. Of course, Clark eventually fiddled with things to be more about corporate intrigue for the movie that escaped onto theaters (the rare occasion when direct-to-video might have served this crap better). Voight, who was an executive producer on the film, now serves as the chief adult star to go along with one person returning from the last film. Gregory Poppen wrote the screenplay while Steven Paul (one of the people responsible for the last film's script) wrote the story and produced the film. Paul apparently really fought for the film when it came to the dawdling of actually releasing it, since as quoted by Voight, he was the who kept "awareness of it up." Truly inspiring. I can imagine that Now & Forever (2002), the only theatrical effort Clark did between the Baby Geniuses films that closed out his career before his untimely death, could be better. There were no more of these movies in theaters, but Voight appeared in three Baby Geniuses movies for the direct-to-video market. Tragically, Clark died in 2007 at the age of 67 in a head-on car crash, with this being his last feature film.
Now you have super babies with super strength to go along with brother reveals and plans about TVs making kids stay inside the house (nowadays you might as well worry about the iPads seeping one's attention span). It isn't particularly worthy to get mad and launch a comprehensive review about how this manages to be worse than the original, one that might make you wonder if you could give a -1 rating to a movie. The whole movie just seems unnatural, ugly and lifeless in ways that even mediocre movies blow out of the water in terms of actual entertainment value. Nothing changed in the five years from the first film to make one believe babies could be funny talking except for the people making it. I wonder how they came up with the idea of an apparently immortal being that will be stuck in the body of a three-year old baby that goes around protecting kids in his weird lair. Voight must've been watching too many movies about German-speaking doctors and thought it would be a neat bit for this film. There may have been movies in Voight's past and present that were actually effective, but this is clearly not one of them for a movie that would've been great to crush in the Berlin Wall. Baio has exactly one film credit that I remember with Bugsy Malone (1976), which had child actors play adult roles, incidentally. The nicest way to describe him here is "vacant". Shaye gives it a go for a movie that offers one nothing beyond a check. You know those cheesy b-movies that maybe don't have the effects or all-around acting to get the whole way across the finish line? Superbabies proves that having money ($20 million apparently) to pair Academy Award winning actors with effects made from the backside of God is not everything. Let's just throw out some words to call the movie to at least practice some alliteration for "education" about the movie: Incoherent, incompetent, insane, insecure, idiotic, ignominious, ignorant. I would rather see someone feed AI this crap just to see how it would respond to getting soullessness for a prompt (editor's note: do not do this).
Hell, I've run out of bile, so in the tradition of Thanksgiving, let me just repurpose old material for you: Getting kids (age 5-9, apparently) rather than adult voices to voice the babies (such as say, Look Who's Talking [1989]) is probably the least sad thing of the whole thing. What could possibly invite you to waste 95 minutes on a movie that never succeeds in every joke that is attempted? If there was a God, I do not believe that watching babies walk and talk would be high on the priority list. You might as well call it the film most likely to be thought of as having no soul in it. The people who made this film probably did not think much of the film either during or after production, but that doesn't give an excuse for this being one of the worst things I have ever seen. Hell, it shouldn't even be called a film, it should be put in a special garbage can that you would put expired food products in. You might think, oh, well, Monster a Go-Go (1965) is filled with more inconsistencies and worse acting. Well, maybe, but that has the label of being made in weirder circumstances of "make the best out of the footage", what kind of excuse does this Hollywood slop have? Absolutely none. Clark and his team probably thought it was one of those things you can put on for the kids and enjoy, but no, they did not. It's easy to say folks are mailing it in, but, well, yea, they are mailing it in as if this was a direct-to-video production, complete with little motivation to do much of anything. They repeat one line four times in quick succession and later do a repeat of a gag where an adult gets tricked into getting hit in the beans after talking about it. The voices coming out of those babies were never going to work with how it looked because it just isn't a useful effect that you would want to see for very long. It is a gag that has run amok for what might as well count for anti-comedy. Truly, this was a sad experience to sit through, because it means that Bob Clark may be one of few people who directed both a vaunted classic and a horrendously awful feature in the same career. Avoid, unless you like garbage.
Overall, I give it 0 out of 10 stars.
Next up: Black Friday gives you relief in boredom with the return of W. Lee Wilder and The Snow Creature.
No comments:
Post a Comment