Top Box Office Movies - Super Babies: Baby Geniuses 2

Super Babies: Baby Geniuses 2 (2004) Sony Pictures Entertainment
1 hr. 35 mins.
Starring: Jon Voight, Scott Baio, Vanessa Angel, Skyler Shaye
Directed by: Bob Clark

Super Babies: Baby Geniuses 2

Rating:

E-MAIL FRANK OCHIENG

Why didn’t anybody enforce the child labor laws when making this piece of kiddie caper dreck? For those of you who couldn’t wait for this flaccid follow-up to the 1999 modestly successful original Baby Geniuses starring Kathleen Turner and Christopher Lloyd then brace yourselves because you’ll get a second feeding of the same old tyke-oriented tainted treats. It’s still inexplicably bewildering as to how well the first installment fared in the theaters. Now five years later, director Bob Clark (who shoved this tepid tot tale down our throats the first time around) is back and ready to expand his juvenile jinx with the banal bratty laugher Super Babies: Baby Geniuses 2. Clark’s CGI-induced rugrat romp is about as inspiring in its hilarity as a diaper rash. Exceedingly nonsensical and…excuse the intended pun—infantile, Super Babies: Baby Geniuses 2 is this year’s most excruciatingly unnecessary and cockeyed comedies to emerge so painfully.

One might not be sure what to think is more inconceivable in terms of what’s considered astonishing. Is it the fact that you have an Oscar-winning actor in Jon Voight whose embarrassing participation in this silly and saggy saga defies logic based on his big screen dignity? Or is it the fact that folks may be receptive one again to the goofy antics of computer-induced conversing crybaby characters that persists in milking out a gimmicky gag? What the heck—you be the judge! If you have an inkling for meshing together the Look Who’s Talking movies with the gadget intrigue of the Spy Kids flicks then you have the stale idea of what you’re in store for concerning Clark’s pointless preschooler project.

As for the pitiful but playful plot, Scott Baio (teenage gals of yesteryear—your beloved dreamy Chachi from old TV reruns) and Vanessa Angel star as married daycare center owners who take up the cause for their youthful charges and babysitter Kylie (Skyler Shaye). The intrepid crew tries to take on the battle involving German evil media mogul Biscane (Voight). We’ll get back to the vapid yet villainous Biscane later on.

Not only are Baio and Angel daycare owners of the family-owned Bobbins’ World, their toddler Archie is the ringleader of three other toddlers-in-turmoil—Finkleman, Alex and Rosita. When the baby formula bunch stumble upon the devious Biscane in his twisted efforts to control the children’s thought-processes through the unassuming cynical airwaves of a television show, they are joined by a veteran Biscane basher in a 6-year old named Kahuna. Together, they all try to eradicate the double dealing of their resilient archenemy. Of course the unique MO regarding these crusading crumbcrushers is that they can communicate as wise-cracking adults spewing sarcastic quips and preposterous puns. But the hapless adults that make up their world only hear their grown-up language as baby babble of the “ga ga goo goo” variety.

Although the flippant comments by the youngsters are supposed to be irreverent, this whole zany mess is nothing but a baseless and banal session of flimsy filmmaking. There’s no underlying sharp-witted satirical edginess that pits these caustic kids against their older brainless competitors as a way of indicating the inherent smartness that tots may have at the expense of witless seniors that don’t always have everything on the ball. Clark, whose previous work has given audiences a decent chuckle in the past with A Christmas Story and Porky’s, clearly has given up the fight here to instill the numbing and nauseous Superbabies: Baby Geniuses 2 with anything credible that would register with bona fide laughs. This corroding comedy is sluggish and woefully trivial. The special effects are uneven in its creepy execution of having the juveniles’ talk with their CGI mouths that somehow don’t match the precocious words that they are trying to utter with cleverness. The situational lameness of the intended peril in the movie has all the urgency of a kindergarten student with a loose bladder.

The manufactured jokes are curiously rusty and outdated (look out for a Mike Tyson ear-biting reference that is old as the hills itself). There are several scenes that aren’t logically substantive even for a flick that should be dismissed as an automatic goof. As for the labored dumb dialogue, it’s not even inspired to make these little pesky protagonists look like the interesting scamps the movie wants to portray them as with spunk and sauciness. They are cute and cunning but the meek material fails them miserably in terms of their defiant yet dimwitted adventures.

The clueless kiddies shouldn’t be sent to bed without supper for participating in this interminable and dunderhead display of soupy silliness. In fact, it’s the filmmakers that need to starve for ushering out an indigestible kiddie comedy that had no business being made in the first place. Overall, these justice-seeking Superbabies are very vulnerable and vacuous without their bib of creativity.

Hmmm…where’s the Department of Social Services when you need them!

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Frank Ochieng
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