Five-Star Reviews: BABY GENIUSES
Setting the Tone
Welcome to Five-Star Reviews, a recurring Movie Club column built on the premise that every film—no matter how good, bad, or ugly—does at least one thing that merits some semblance of respect and celebration. For the first entry in this series, I could go no place else other than the first movie I brought to Movie Club, Baby Geniuses.
The theme for my first round with the crew was “Movies you loved when you were 12, but haven’t seen since.” In response to this prompt, and regrettably without screening the movie first, I selected Baby Geniuses for what I anticipated would be a mostly silly viewing experience. For the next 137 minutes, I subjected the rest of Movie Club to a rash of legitimately disturbing baby vibes, complete with demonic CGI mouths movements, dance moves, and…romantic partners.
Also, please consider I mostly knew the rest of Movie Club as coworkers at this point and while I had demonstrated a reasonable taste in films, there was really nothing I had to fall back on to defend my choice. It wasn’t funny bad, it wasn’t I can’t believe they went for it bad, it was ‘awkward laughs 20 minutes in and a slow uncomfortable burn all the way to the end from there’ bad. It remains a cornerstone of my reputation in the group, and god willing no one shall ever fall beneath it.
BUT
This is Five-Star Reviews, and in this house we see beauty in the grotesque. When I had to pick a truly impressive aspect within this movie, something I would recommend someone study to get a better sense of how movies can work in the darkest of places, I would have to highlight the way this movie SETS THE MF TONE.
Setting the tone in a movie can be a delicate thing. Do too little and it becomes difficult to hook your audience. Do too much and you may step on your own momentum early and never get back to initial life breathed into the theater. However, when you have nothing to get back to and pure chaos ahead, you may as well get the entire vibe of the movie down from the get-go and charge blindly into that bad night. This is what Baby Geniuses does as well as any film I’ve seen.
Baby Geniuses begins with a full-fledged SWAT team effort to catch a baby, communicating that this baby both possesses super-human skills and is an immediate threat. Helicopters, spotlights, the works. You get everything in this initial chase scene; the bad CGI, the uncomfortable adult acting, the annoying baby that somehow undercuts his own cuteness throughout the film to be insufferable in a truly perplexing way. Eventually the baby is caught, but the damage has already been done. This is roughly the point during my first screening with Movie Club that I was genuinely afraid I would not be invited back.
It’s difficult to say how wholly the opening scene of Baby Geniuses communicates the tone of the film and helplessness you feel inside when watching it. I don’t know what part of my brain was broken when I watched this film on repeat for a few months as a child, but I’m glad it’s fixed now. For now, I’ll save you the trouble of ever watching this entire movie if you would, for just a brief moment, see how a truly bad movie can quickly set the tone, and at the same time set the bar for what comes next lower than anything else I’ve ever seen. With all due credit to Inglourious Basterds, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and The Lion King, no film, whether good or bad, has ever delivered on the promise of its opening scene more succinctly than Baby Geniuses. Enjoy.
Editor's Disclaimer: It is incredibly difficult to find unaltered clips of Baby Geniuses. This clip features the scene Jesse mentions, though it also has commentary from someone called "The Comedy Jew" who is in no way affiliated with Movie Club.