Baby Geniuses

There’s a Pepsi commercial that shows an infant in the maternity ward, blowing kisses at Cindy Crawford and two other models. It’s popularity has spawned a slew of other 60 second baby commercials which utilize CGI technology, or computer-generated imaging.

The idea of exploiting the technology into a 90 minute feature film shouldn’t surprise us, considering the paucity of entertaining movies this year. Lo and behold, we end up with Baby Geniuses, a new generation copycat of the Look Who’s Talking movie series.

Baby Geniuses misses on all counts. The screenplay is geared for young children, but the dialogue is hardly child-like. Witness this line from the two year old hero named Sylvester: "If you’re going to talk out of your (lower anatomy) all the time, maybe you should wear a bow tie on your butt." I feel sorry for the parents, who outside of a chuckle or two at the special effects, won’t find this movie funny at all. Grim is a better word to describe it. Parents and kids have to sit through ninety minutes of insipid tripe for three minutes of special effects. What a colossal waste of time and money.

The plot, from what I can gather, involves a secret laboratory trying to create a breed of super intelligent infants. The aforementioned Sylvester escapes to expose the evil doings of Dr. Kinder (Kathleen Turner) and Dr. Heep (Christopher Lloyd). Peter MacNicol and Kim Cattrall are also trapped in the proceedings.

The adult performers look genuinely embarrassed on screen. They should be. They might consider firing their agents.