Here, there's never a point where seeing Tim's imagination feels anything less than sad. But at least in the first Boss Baby, the depiction of Tim's imagination felt clever and creative, as the audience is placed into the mind of a little boy who takes far more comfort in his mental concoctions than the dull vagaries of the real world. Tom McGrath, who directed the original, brings the same frantic pacing to Family Business as was the case before, in the hopes that moving things super-quickly will elide the film's many creative problems. (This leaves aside their mother and Tim's wife, voiced by Eva Longoria, in part because the script has absolutely no use for her.) So instead, we just get more of Tim and Ted fighting with each other, even though the novelty of seeing a baby talk and act like Jack Donaghy from 30 Rock got progressively less funny by the end of the original film, let alone seeing it revived for a sequel. As the first film ended, it raised the question: what would it be like for the gender dynamic to switch, from being about brothers to sisters? But Tabitha is little more than a plot device she and Tina barely interact with each other, and seem to love each other quite a lot.
There were perhaps ways to take a second Boss Baby in a new, intriguing direction. So thanks to a special potion, Tim and Ted revert to their youthful selves for 48 hours to.y'know, considering that Michael McCullers' script is so shoddily designed, there's next to no purpose in talking about the story much further. Tim and Ted, grown up though they are, have been recruited for a special mission, to learn more about a pioneering child psychologist (Jeff Goldblum) whose spread of high-performing schools across the globe may hide a nefarious plan to dominate the world. (More importantly, she seems more interested in Ted as her uncle than Tim as her father.) Tim is doubly horrified when he too learns that Tina (voiced by Amy Sedaris) is just like his little brother, a walking, talking infant straight from the halls of Babåorp. But Tim is horrified that Tabitha's imagination is far more limited than his own, and she's interested in things like learning. When Family Business begins, Tim (now voiced by James Marsden) sees himself as a great dad, still indulging in his overactive imagination when playing with his daughter Tabitha and baby sister Tina. How can a sequel to this manical animated film possibly bring Tim and Ted back to their youth? As Family Business shows, there is an answer: by thinking of the sweatiest, most desperate, and lowest-common-denominator ways possible. But The Boss Baby wasn't just narrated from the adult perspective of the lead character it concluded by showing the audience grown-up versions of both Tim and Ted Templeton (voiced then by Tobey Maguire and Alec Baldwin), with Tim's eldest daughter being shocked to see her baby sister as a boss baby too. The 2017 original, inspired by the books by Marla Frazee, at least tackled the question of sibling rivalry from a novel idea of an older sibling perceiving their new baby sibling as a ruthless businessman robbing them of their parents' unconditional love. The Boss Baby: Family Business is many things. DreamWorks Animation movies aren't graded on a curve, in part because when they're good, it's a miracle. But here are we are at the start of a new month, with another studio releasing its animated film to its own streaming service.