Bottom Feeders: Superbabies – Baby Geniuses 2

Children are parasites.  They make you fat so they can feed off your body and then wreck your shit when you poop them out.  It doesn’t help that it hurts so much you frequently poop actual poop as well.  And that’s just the first nine months.  You’ve got about another 25 years until you can be realistically rid of them – if you’re lucky.  Fortunately for you after about 11 or 12 of those they start developing personalities and going to school and cut you a little slack, but that first decade or so is a mean motherfucker.  Hollywood knows this.  They see you shackled to that baby like Jennifer Anniston and Gerard Butler in The Bounty Hunter, or Jennifer Anniston and anyone she’s with in real life and see an opportunity.  They know having that milk sipping bastard means you can’t go see all the good movies, but you still need to leave the house sometimes.  That’s where kids movies come in.

Children’s movies are some of the greatest and worst in existence.  Pixar, Studio Ghibli and older disney movies are usually amazing.  They’re telling stories that children can relate to and understand, but at their core are just well-made.  They appeal to children without pandering to them.  Then there are the movies whose only goals are to exist and to soak up money from people who can’t bring their kids to Spider Man because it has punching.  That’s the sort of movie Baby Geniuses 2 is.  It’s shamelessly exploitative, as any movie with a character that is both a talking baby and token black guy is doomed to be.  This thing tries so fucking hard to be adorable in the worst, stupidest way possible.  Every joke is poop or fart or pee or diapers.  I can’t imagine how hard it is for parents to sit there with a kid and be reminded of what hassle they are just to keep alive every time the screen writers go for a cheap laugh.  The babies also run around in diapers the whole time, despite being way too old, probably because nobody said “Hey, what if we had the kids wear pants?  Wouldn’t that be adorable, if they made tiny pants for children?”

That’s the kind of stupid this movie brings to the table.  Baby Geniuses is a bit confusing because it’s clearly a cheap cash-in, but there’s way too much shit you can’t explain just by them not giving a fuck.  They don’t just do things that make the movie worse, they do things that make it worse and are way harder than the thing that would have made it better.  Babies who are old enough to talk still have voice dubs.  John Voight is regular aged in a five minute flashback and old-guyed up for the rest of the movie with a white wig.  Some of the babies have midget stunt doubles who apparently have their own full-sized stunt doubles.  That’s what really sets Baby Geniuses aside: It’s a movie about babies who are supposed to be smarter than grown adults made by grown adults that are dumber than the stupidest baby you’ve ever seen.

The main minds behind BG2 are Bob Clark, (Director) Gregory Poppen (Writer) and Stephen Paul. (Writer, Producer) So that you know exactly what we’re dealing with here, let’s run through some career highlights:

-Clark is the mind behind ‘Porkies 2: The Next Day’ and ‘She-Man’ – where ‘A soldier is forced to take estrogen and wear lingerie when he’s blackmailed by a violent transvestite.’ (Bob Clark also directed ‘A Christmas Story,’ the only Christmas movie good enough to watch year round, but believe me when I say that that was a rare moment of clarity in a sea of crazy.)

-Poppen is the screenwriter behind both ‘The Prince and the Surfer’ and ‘Karate Dog’ (Featuring the voice of Chevy Chase!)

-Paul co-wrote ‘Karate Dog,’ non-executive produced ‘Ghost Rider’ and has a ‘story’ credit for the Pauly Shore vehicle ‘Opposite Day.’

Hollywood thinks that your kids are stupid and so are you.  That’s why they hire idiots like these to write for them.  No one else could include the line ‘We can switch the mind control message to freedom control!’ in a movie and not immediately hara-kiri themselves in shame.  But after all that bullshit they’re not even done.  They have the balls to reference Casa Blanca in the final scene and allude to a sequel.  They’re so dumb – and so convinced that you are too – that they think you’ll be back, begging for more.  The insane thing is I haven’t even gotten to the worst parts.  There’s just too many to cover it all but here’s a nice scene that sums it up:

 

If you’re keeping track, that’s a Whoopi Goldberg cameo followed by an O-Town cameo followed by two seconds of stock footage of George Bush, who I’m assuming didn’t mail his video in on time.  That’s three straight references to people children don’t and shouldn’t give even one fuck about.  It just raises way too many questions.  Where does this kid get off calling Whoopi Goldberg ‘Whoops?’  How do I make my blood stop boiling after that O-Town video?  How do you have to time for both of those people and need to put the fucking president on hold.  I don’t care whether you like Bush or not, that’s just a dick move.  Also, don’t be surprised if there’s a Baby Geniuses 3 script floating around town where the babies help O-Town finally finish that song.

Baby Geniuses 2 is currently third on the IMDB Bottom 100, juuuust below ‘Daniel the Wizard.’  It completely deserves a one star rating.  That’s the third children’s movie in a row that I’ve bestowed the honor upon.  To me the problem with all three is that they target children as an audience and think that lowers the bar instead of raising it.  We owe it to kids, as annoying and leech-like as they are, to show them good entertainment.  Pandering to them is probably the biggest asshole move you can pull, and guarantees I’m going to look at your pile of crap extra unfavorably.  It’s the only industry where intentionally lowering your standards because your product is ‘just for children’ doesn’t get you fired and that’s wrong, because those little pricks are our future.

 

Am I right or am I right?  Email all opinions, in the form of a yes or no answer, to [email protected] and explain yourself before you cause pain to yourself.  Or, follow me on Twitter @Dan_Tompkins.  You can shout at me there and as a bonus, I will amuse you.