They grow up so fast, don’t they? It was just four years ago that the Templetons welcomed a new child into the family. Ted was an odd baby who wore a suit onesie, carried a briefcase and spoke the language of the boardroom. “I may look like a baby but I was born all grown up,” he said in “The Boss Baby.”
Cut to “The Boss Baby: Family Business,” now playing in theatres. Older brother Tim (voiced by James Marsden) is now an adult and estranged from his “boss” baby brother Ted (Alec Baldwin). Their lives have taken different paths. Tim is now married to Carol (Eva Longoria) and a suburban dad to 7-year-old daughter Tabitha (Ariana Greenblatt) and infant Tina (Amy Sedaris). Ted, unsurprisingly, is a hedge fund manager and workaholic.
Tabitha seems to be following in her uncle’s footsteps, attending the Acorn Center for Advanced Childhood. She’s at the top of her class but what she doesn’t know is that Tina, the baby, is a spy for BabyCorp. “I’m in the family business,” she says. “And now you work for me Boomers!” Her mission? Find out exactly what’s up at Tabitha’s school and if its founder, Dr. Erwin Armstrong (Jeff Goldblum) is really planning a baby revolution. “We can make parents do whatever we want,” he yells.
The investigation brings the brothers, who drink a formula that turns them back into toddlers, together and reveals deep bonds. “Just because you grow up,” says Tina, “doesn’t mean you have to grow apart.”
Like all sequels “Boss Baby: Family Business” is bigger, louder and more frenetic than the original. In a blur of color and action, it uses kid-friendly humour and inventive animation to re-enforce a standard lesson about the importance of family.
The messaging may be generic, but the solid voice work from Marsden, Baldwin, Sedaris and Goldblum (who seems to be having a blast) inject vibrant life into it. This is essentially a one joke premise dragged kicking and screaming into feature length but director Tom McGrath expands the world of the first film (which he also directed) staging scenes with baby ninjas and inside Tim’s head. There are no big surprises really, but he does keep much of the mischievousness that made the first film so enjoyable.
“The Boss Baby: Family Business” moves at a rapid speed that may exhaust parents, but should keep young minds, who may have followed the adventures of the Boss Baby series on Netflix for the last four years, entertained.
For most parents reading this Dora the Explorer needs no introduction. The animated Latina superstar has a level of preschooler fame that has inspired a cottage industry that includes three dozen foreign language adaptations, books, play kitchens, cosmetics, hygiene products and anything else on which you can slap Dora’s adorable image. Nineteen years after her TV debut Dora makes the leap to the big screen in the live-action family-adventure “Dora and the Lost City of Gold.”
“Instant Family’s” Isabela Moner plays the explorer, an intrepid youngster who grew up in the jungles of South America with her archaeology professor parents (Michael Peña and Eva Longoria).
As her parents are on the cusp of their greatest discovery, the lost Incan city of Parapata, said to contain more gold than the rest of the world combined, the homeschooled adventurer is sent off to live with her aunt, uncle and cousin Diego (Jeff Wahlberg) and high school in Los Angeles. “I think it would be good for you to be out in the world, around kids your own age,” her mother says.
She’s rather be trekking through the jungles of Peru with her folks and sassy little monkey Boots (voice of Danny Trejo), but a much different adventure, involving mean-spirited teenagers who nickname her Dorka and metal detectors, awaits her in California. “I never felt lonely when I was alone in the jungle,” she says, “but now surrounded by kids I feel alone.”
When her parents disappear Dora, Diego and two schoolmates are kidnapped by some terrible people who want the kids to trek through the jungle, (“You have nothing to be scared of. The trouble is perfectly safe. Just don’t touch anything or agree it’s too deep.”) track down the parents and the location of the riches of Parapata.
A great deal of humour comes from Dora’s naïve approach to school life. “I hope this is a wild goose chase,” her class’s mean girl Sammy (Madeleine Madden). “I hope it is,” Dora replies. “I love chasing wild geese until I catch one. They are nasty.” It’s good situational humour that sets up Dora’s intelligence—the fourth wall lessons from the television show are also firmly in place. “Can you say neurotoxicity?”—her social ineptness and the character’s guilelessness.
The fast-paced film is part message movie featuring life lessons about how anything is possible if you believe in yourself how to do a poo hole in the jungle (“I tell you this to make you wiser,” Dora sings, “and because it’s natural fertilizer.”), part “Scooby-Doo style adventure. There’s even a trippy hallucination scene that pays direct homage to the movie’s cartoon roots.
Like the main character “Dora and the Lost City of Gold” is relentlessly upbeat, brought to live-action with fun, performances that, while broad, still have heart. It’s both an updating of thr popular character and a throwback to old-school family adventure films.
In the dog days of summer comes “Dog Days,” starring a cast of folks including Vanessa Hudgens, “Stranger Things’s” Finn Wolfhard and Eva Longoria brought together by their canines. Expect bastardized cover versions of pooch songs like “Walking the Dog” and “Who Let the Dogs Out?” and more easy sentimentality than you can shake a dog bone at.
Set in modern day Los Angeles the story follows a litter of characters. There’s the host of a TV morning show (Nina Dobrev), her co-host (Tone Bell), a dog rescue owner (Jon Bass) with eyes for a barista (Hudgens) who has a crush on the vet next door (Michael Cassidy). That should be enough, but there’s also a couple (Thomas Lennon and Jessica St. Clair) who leave their unruly dog in the care of her even more unruly brother (Adam Pally) while another family (Longoria and David Cross) whose family is completed by a stray. Meanwhile, in another part of town, an elderly man (Ron Cephas Jones) and his pizza delivery boy (Wolfhard) bond over the love of a pug. Eventually, everyone finds either love or a sense of purpose or both through their dogs.
“Dog Days” is so predictable it’s as if the studio forced a bot to watch hundreds of hours of rom coms and Garry Marshal movies and then sat back as the machine spit out a script based on all the data. Beat for beat it telegraphs what is coming next as though any deviation from the form will result in a case of ringworm.
On the plus side, the dogs in “Dog Days” do not speak. If they could, they might say things like, “Call my agent! What am I doing in a movie as bad as this?”
You will not be bow-wowed by “Dog Days.” Instead you may wonder, not who, but why let the dogs out?
