So I haven’t done a movie review in a little while and I happened to see two movies this past weekend, so I thought it was time to do one. The two family films or kid’s movies that I went to see with a friend were The Boss Baby and Smurfs: The Lost Village. I have to admit from the previews I was a lot more excited about Smurfs than Boss Baby. The whole idea of a baby acting like an adult kind of weirded me out and even though I like Alec Baldwin’s humor, I wasn’t sure it would work out in a kid’s movie. Smurf’s on the other hand, looked extremely funny from the previews and I thought an all-animated movie would be an improvement over the mix of live-action and animated figures that we have seen in past Smurf movies.
And so, into the theater I went. The first film I saw was The Boss Baby, and I was surprised at how good it was. There were multiple funny lines and scenes, and the characters had a depth with great strengths and weaknesses. I was especially excited to see how both of the main characters grew through the movie. The single child realizes how fun and good having a brother can be. And the boss baby learns what he’s been missing out on by not being part of a family and how empty career advancement really is. And both boys learn how love isn’t limited but how it can grow to include more and more people.
At the end of Boss Baby I was just so happy. It had enough surprises for me to not feel like I had known exactly what would happen before I even watched the movie, and it had a satisfying conclusion where both characters get what they thought they wanted and then decide to change and give up their old desires for new better ones.
After a snack break and some leg stretching me and my friend headed back to the theaters for the Smurf movie. As I watched the movie, I found myself not laughing as much as I had thought I would. I realized that most of the jokes that I had found funny in the preview were the same jokes in the movie. After seeing them in the previews, they just weren’t as funny and there were not many additional ones to the ones I’d already seen. There was also not a lot of surprises either. The majority of the plot had already been revealed in the preview: other Smurfs exist in the forbidden forest, and four of our more familiar Smurfs go find them, the new Smurfs are all girls, then they have to defeat the evil wizard. There were a couple of other things that weren’t shown in the preview, but it definitely felt like I already knew most of the plotline. So when we finally got to the climax and it seemed like one of the Smurfs was a goner, I seriously doubted that it would end that way, and of course that Smurf magically came back to life. So it was an emotional ending, but somewhat predictable.
In the end, I actually liked Boss Baby more than the Smurf movie. This might have had a bit to do with low expectations for Boss Baby and High Expectations for Smurfs. Or perhaps I was excited for a movie when I saw Boss Baby and a little tired of watching movies by the time I saw Smurfs. But I think the biggest reason was because Smurfs revealed too much of its plotline in its previews and that made the movie predictable. Whereas Boss Baby set up the intro of its movie nicely in its previews but left most of the plot a surprise for the audience, and it had more of a surprising ending.
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