In 2017 director Tom McGrath and writer Michael McCullers scored with The Boss Baby, a DreamWorks Animation film based on the children’s books by Marla Frazee about Baby Corp., a celestial baby-producing company that sent Ted (voiced by Alec Baldwin), one of their top executives, to earth as a supposedly ordinary infant to disrupt the growing human devotion to puppies, which threatened their business model. Ted joined with his older brother Tim to bring down the nefarious Puppy Corp.
This sequel builds on both its predecessor and a subsequent Netflix series spin-off. Tim (James Marsden) is now a stay-at-home dad and Ted is a pompous Wall Street bigwig, adored by Tim’s adolescent daughter Tabitha (Ariana Greenblatt).
The plot kicks in when Tim’s infant daughter Tina (Amy Sedaris) is revealed to be another Baby Corp. agent tasked with sabotaging the scheme of Dr. Erwin Armstrong (Jeff Goldblum), the principal of Tabitha’s cutting-edge school. Armstrong's goal is to lead a baby revolution that will put his brainwashed army of students in charge of the world and relegate adults to irrelevance.
Tina enlists her dad and uncle in the mission, returning Ted to infancy and Tim to adolescence so that they can infiltrate Armstrong’s Acorn Academy as students and ruin his plans for a global takeover. While Tim joins Tabitha’s class as a distinct underachiever and immediately attracts the attention of a nasty bully and a creepy girl, Ted is warehoused with other infants and engineers a jailbreak.
Everything culminates during a big assembly at the Academy, where parents are brought to meet their fate and Ted and Tim go to great lengths to prevent Armstrong from succeeding.
There are occasional amusing bits of dialogue and nimble sight gags scattered throughout Family Business, but it replicates the formula of the first installment slavishly while ramping up the decibel level and frenetic pacing: the movie is almost incredibly noisy, busy, and garish, which might appeal to young kids but will probably leave adults more dazed than enchanted. Charm, on the other hand, is in extremely short supply.
So if one likes breakneck action, eye-splitting volume, and dazzling colors in animated fare, this movie certainly provides them. But real magic is lacking. Still, this will have to be a strong optional acquisition for family collections.