Baby Geniuses
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 An actual genius can star in a better film than this.
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Baby Geniuses is a 1999 American family-oriented comedy film directed by Bob Clark. It stars Kathleen Turner and Christopher Lloyd.
The film has the distinction of being the first full-length feature film to use computer-generated imagery for the synthesis of human visual speech. 2D warping techniques were used to digitally animate the mouth viseme shapes of the babies which were originally shot with their mouths closed. The viseme shapes were sampled from syllables uttered by the babies on the set.
Plot
Two scientists, Dr. Elena Kinder (Kathleen Turner) and Dr. Heep (Christopher Lloyd) use genius-baby studies to fund BabyCo's theme park "Joyworld". According to Dr. Kinder's research on toddlers/babies, babies are born possessing vast, universal knowledge and speak a secret yet impossible-to-translate baby pre-language called Babytalk. However, at age 2–3, the knowledge and language are lost as the babies cross over by learning how to speak human languages. Most of the babies raised in Dr. Kinder's underground research facility were adopted from the Pasadena City orphanage, transformed into little geniuses through the use of the Kinder Method, and then used in experiments to decipher this secret yet the impossible-to-translate language used by the 7 baby-geniuses.
One mischievous toddler, Sylvester (the only one of her toddlers who was raised through the use of the superior version of the Kinder Method), makes repeated attempts to escape Dr. Kinder's research facility, and one night, Sylvester goes into a dirty diaper truck and he actually succeeds. The next morning, one thing Sylvester does not expect is to run into his long-lost normal twin brother, Whit, in a mall playground. Although Sylvester and Whit share a telepathic bond, they have no idea of each other's existence. While the guards from Dr. Kinder's research facility capture Whit, mistaking him for Sylvester, and take him back to Dr. Kinder's research facility, Sylvester is taken home by Whit's adopted mother, Robin (Kim Cattrall), who is Dr. Kinder's niece. After Dr. Kinder and the six other baby-geniuses are shocked that Whit and Sylvester switched places at the mall, Dr. Kinder decides to do a cross-evaluation on Sylvester and Whit. However, when she comes to Robin's husband, Dan Bobbin (Peter MacNicol), she realizes that Dan can understand babies. After the attempts to retrieve Sylvester fail, Dr. Kinder decides to move the research facility to Liechtenstein, and they have no chance but to make Whit be the only normal baby to be raised in this research facility until they can find a possible way to get Sylvester back to her research facility.
The babies at Bobbin's place hypnotize Lenny (Dom DeLuise), the bus driver to drive to Dr. Kinder's research facility. Once at the research facility, Sylvester goes to the control room to set the robots from the theme park on the lab scientists. When the Bobbins return home, their natural daughter Carrie tells her father that the children are in Dr. Kinder's research facility. At the end of the fight, Dr. Kinder captures Whit and takes him to the helicopter pad on the roof. Robin and Dan chase them to the roof, where Dr. Kinder reveals that she and Robin are not related and that Robin was adopted at age two. After Dr. Kinder is arrested by the police, Sylvester and Whit come together on the roof to cross over.
Dan and Robin adopt Sylvester. And Dr. Heep is now in charge of Dr. Kinder's Research facility. Dan is still curious about the secrets of life; but, as the twins have crossed over, they no longer know those secrets. Carrie, their sister, doesn't reveal anything (just giving a sly smile) because adults aren't meant to know their secrets.
Why This Film Is Not a Genius
- The premise is unbelievably stupid; the babies are born with super intelligence and then lose it as they get older, which is rather confusing as it isn't explained that what will happen to their intelligence when they're older and will they remember it when they are older children, teenagers or fully grown adults, which creates a massive plot hole throughout the film about the concept and makes the film's plot very hard to follow and extremely confusing at best.
- The babies in this film act more like adults than actual babies, which is more disturbing than funny as they feel less cute and begin to feel more like cartoon characters rather than real life 2 year old infants.
- Terrible CGI effects. The mouths moving on the babies are very similar to a technology used in the 1950s TV show Clutch Cargo, often criticized for looking creepy.
- Awkward acting, particularly from Christopher Lloyd and Kathleen Turner.
- It overuses wide-angle lenses (especially in the opening).
- Unfunny and repetitive humor, mainly with the overuse of gross-out humor and slapstick gags that later become rather repetitive and monotonous when they are repeated throughout the film.
- The phrase "diaper gravy" is used four times in a short time frame, which is extremely annoying.
- Nightmarish animatronics, especially on the baby and clown mascots.
- The baby mascot's voice is also very demonic-sounding, which makes him even scarier.
- Christopher Lloyd looks like he had plastic surgery done to his face to look younger, which looks very awkward and creepy at best for a man his age at the time as he was 60 years old when this movie came out and had gotten rather elderly throughout the years.
- Inappropriate and unfunny dialogue in a family film. For example: in one scene, Sylvester says "ass", when Robin lies to the police dispatcher about a bomb being set at BabyCo. before the climactic showdown between Dr. Kinder and the babies, when Sly asks a baby girl to take her clothes off and she tells him that he could take her out to dinner first and when Carrie asks Sly about having time going to the potty and Sly answers back to her with "You're wearing the potty! Put it on hold, this is much more important."
- Dr Kinder is an absolutely pathetic villain, since she has no reason to keep a few babies trapped in a research facility, and has no motivation for her plan, and isn't very threatening in the slightest, which is ironic since Kathleen Turner is an amazing actress, and sadly, her role for the character isn't well-portrayed at all and isn't necessarily evil enough to match the character, thus making Kinder come off as bland and not being that much of a threat to begin with.
- The same thing also applies to the secondary villain, Dr Heep, who is pretty bland and forgettable, and barely does anything aside from being Dr Kinder's assistant and the comic relief, that's it and Christopher Lloyd's weak performance sadly ruins the character even further and makes him less threatening and barely intimidating at all, and moreso as a pathetic joke, making his role in the movie almost pointless and trivial at best.
- Poor production values, as it suffers from shoddy camera work, poorly made sets and props, and low quality audio that are unacceptable for a film released in 1999, as it looks more like a TV Series rather than a feature length theatrical film mostly due to the film's budget of $12 million dollars, which is rather shocking, as when adjusted for inflation is about $22 million today. There are plenty of films both past and present that looked way better than this. The Blair Witch Project, which was released around the same year, looked way better than this! And that film was a sixteenth of this film's budget!
- The film lacks any emotion or charm to it, as the writing is so bad that it prevents the film from being timeless, and only known for being a gimmicky movie that features talking babies, which is proof that the film has zero importance to the film industry and now has a track record for being considered one of the worst movies of all time, and even when the film does get emotional, it fails due to how unlikable most of the cast is and have zero chemistry at all, thus making the film feel more dated and bland than anything else.
- Product placement, such as the PlayStation (which is owned by Sony, the company that also owns TriStar Pictures, which distributed this film).
- Heck, there's even footage of Crash Bandicoot in one scene from a film released in 1999 that was distributed by Sony, which hasn't aged very well, since Crash Bandicoot was owned by Universal Pictures and the next year, the contract between the two companies for the IP expired, and the series nowadays is owned by Microsoft (the creators of the Modern Computers and the Xbox brand).
- It spawned numerous sequels, which are equally just as bad (if not worse) than the original film itself, especially the second and fourth films in the series, proving that Sony didn't take any form of criticism aimed towards this franchise.
- In fact, the sequels have gotten a lot more childish and kiddy in terms of tone and writing, and have gotten dumbed-down to mostly appeal to toddlers and that's it.
- Unimpressive direction from Bob Clark, who directed A Christmas Story which is considered an all time classic by many fans alike and is praised as one of the greatest Christmas movies of all time.
- The soundtrack, aside from the ending song, is pretty forgettable and bland with it mostly being generic kids movie music that is way too similar to other films released around that time, and it wastes the amazing talent of Paul Zaza (who did the music for A Christmas Story) and doesn't fit the film at all with most of it sounding like rejected songs from the infamous 1993 Mario movie despite having different composers due to how similar sounding they are to each other with the same key notes being used, and there is also an awkward misuse of the Bee Gees classic Stayin Alive in the scene where Sylvester tries a different set of clothes to wear in an unfunny montage during when he's in the supermarket at night when it's closed, making the soundtrack easily one of the worst parts of the entire film aside from everything else in it.
- Sylvester is a rather unlikeable and annoying character that tries way too hard to act edgy and cool but completely fails due to his awful Bart Simpson-like attitude and failed attempts at trying to be a relatable character for the audience, and also that he acts like a rather rude jerk at times too.
- He also beats up a homeless man for no reason at all, other than to steal his clothes and prevent himself from getting grabbed by the security guards from BabyCo, which comes off as pretty out of character since he wasn't really going to do anything harmful to him and was only trying to raise him in general.
- The film insults it's own target audience and treats them like mindless and braindead children, as it tries to be hip and cool with the 90s kids and shoves several 90s clichés and tropes that are extremely dated by today's standards and even still felt like that when it was first released back in 1999.
- Occasionally, there are moments that often come out-of-nowhere and feel very random due to poor writing and a lack of subtly to give the scene any context or depth that could've moved the story forward but only makes the story more confusing and are only there just to surprise the audience which they don't do a very good job at in the slightest, with the biggest example being when Carrie finds out that Dr Kinder isn't her aunt and that she was adopted by her mom when she was two years old which feels incredibly forced and doesn't work as a twist in the slightest since both of them didn't have that much of a bond or strong relationship in the movie and both characters are so bland that the twist doesn't really come off as shocking but rather an ass-pull that was only shoved into the movie for Carrie to thank god for being adopted and to punch her later, only for Carrie to feel sorry for punching Dr Kinder who she still refers to her as her aunt despite it being revealed that she wasn't to begin with, which actually made that speech kinda pointless and trivial since she would already know by now that she clearly wasn't her aunt and the film's writing is so bad that they just forget about it at the end of the film, making this moment seem more laughable than outright shocking for the audience's expectations when watching the film itself.
- Poor ending that is literally just a clip-show of events that happened in the film and aside from the beautiful ending song, there is nothing memorable about this ending and the scene that comes after the clip-show ends is just a typical "film's finished, all actors can go home now" scene that shows Sylvester running down the filming behind one of the scenes and it just ends with no satisfying conclusion, which can put a negative impression for the viewer watching the film and leave audiences unimpressed after watching the whole film considering how bad it is in general.
Redeeming Qualities
- The ending song is very nice. The same cannot be said of any of the later films.
- Despite aging terribly, the use of CGI for the mouth movements of the Babies was quite impressive at the time and was the first movie to use CGI for human acting by motion capture, which hadn't been done before and was quite inventive since CGI wasn't as popular as it would become in the 2000s and this use of the technology was pretty unique. However, it wasn't handled very well and has aged terribly as said before.
Reception
Baby Geniuses currently holds a score of 2% on Rotten Tomatoes with an average rating of 1.9 out of 10 and a critic consensus that reads "Flat direction and actors who look embarrassed to be onscreen make Baby Geniuses worse than the premise suggests." On Metacritic, it holds a 6/100 meaning "overwhelming dislike". Roger Ebert awarded the film a 1.5 out of 4 stars and stated "Bad films are easy to make, but a film as unpleasant as Baby Geniuses achieves a kind of grandeur."[1] and deemed it as his worst film of 1999 on The Worst of 1999 show with guest critic Joel Siegel of Good Morning America. While Roger deemed Baby Geniuses as his worst film of that year, Joel deemed Pokemon The First Movie as his worst film of 1999. On IMDb, the film has a 2.7 out of 10.
Box Office
Baby Geniuses opened up at #5 on its opening weekend and grossed $5,613,587 in the U.S. It later grossed $27,250,736 domestically. Overall, it made $36,450,736 worldwide against its $12 million budget, making it a moderate box office success.
Awards and nominations
Baby Geniuses was nominated for five Stinkers Bad Movie Awards including Worst Picture, but lost the Worst Picture Award to Wild Wild West. It won one for Bob Clark as "Worst Sense of Direction."
Trivia
- Roger Ebert didn't review the film on his show when it was theatrically released, but he did review it on his Worst of 1999 show. When the film came out, he instead reviewed The Deep End of the Ocean, Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, Cruel Intentions and Analyze This with guest critic Elvis Mitchell.
- The Nostalgia Critic put the film at #7 on his Worst Movies list.
Videos
References
External links
Comments
- 1990s films
- Family films
- Comedy films
- Action films
- Fantasy films
- Films that inspired a Roger Ebert book review title
- Moderate success films
- Sony films
- Films with misleading posters
- Live-action films
- Tristar Pictures films
- Gross-out films
- Movies with obvious product placement
- "It's made for kids"
- Featured on TV Tropes' So Bad, It's Horrible
- Bad media
- Bad movies