Baby's Day Out (1994)

zero stars
Despite his '90s output, John Hughes will forever remain one of my favorite screenwriters. The guy knew how to write great dialogue. He viewed his teenage characters as complex individuals with strengths and weaknesses, dreams and insecurities. What happened? How did he go from Sixteen Candles to this? Baby's Day Out (1994) is his worst movie. Though he wasn't the director, he still wrote it and produced it, which meant he had enough input to take much of the blame for its failures. There is not a single redeemable aspect of the finished product. I didn't buy the premise. The characters are stupid. The soundtrack grates all the way to the bitter end. The special effects are substandard, which might be okay if the movie were any good as a live-action cartoon, but it isn't. The direction is appalling, though I'll give director Patrick Read Johnson a pass because he made Angus the following year. No, this is a John Hughes film, and its existence represents a low point in the revered writer's catalogue. His gifts to Gen X teens and children are still held in high esteem. Baby's Day Out is that lump of coal that accidentally fell into the stocking.

Three bumbling thieves (Joe Mantegna, Joe Pantoliano, Brian Haley) pose as photographers to kidnap an affluent couple's son and hold him hostage for $5 million. Eddie, Norby and Veeko successfully nab the baby and take him back to their hideout, but all manner of mayhem breaks loose when the toddler wanders off and becomes the centerpiece of a long series of sight gags similar to a cartoon featuring a sleepwalking character who escapes one mishap after another. The baby, nicknamed Bink, crawls on rooftops and along planks that pivot between two surfaces. Baby Bink crosses busy streets unharmed, crawls through a busy office building, winds up in an ape's cage at a zoo and roams through a construction site. All of this happens in front of adults who lack peripheral vision. As Baby Bink hops on and off a bus, a taxi and a steel girder, the three thieves trip all over themselves as they fruitlessly chase after the kid. There is not a single shot in this entire tedious movie that can be believed with even the tiniest concession of generosity. Director Johnson, handcuffed to a bad script, stages numerous scenes of people looking away from the baby when they should be either looking at him or registering his movement in the corners of their eyes.

Back home, Baby Bink's mother (Lara Flynn Boyle) and father (Matthew Glave) fret over their missing baby, while F.B.I. Agent Dale Grissom (Fred Thompson, who ran for the G.O.P. nomination for President in 2008) leads the hunt for the kidnappers. The family nanny, Gilbertine (Cynthia Nixon), deduces that Baby Bink is headed somewhere specific and isn't just randomly crawling around the city. Her intuition is correct, although the movie granted itself this get-out-of-jail-free card because it was the only way out. Due to the movie's premise, it was never going to end with someone simply realizing there's an unattended baby moving about. That is my point of contention with this idea. Its success depends entirely on people acting completely unnaturally so they can be oblivious to a baby on the ground. At one point, Baby Bink pulls a microphone from a news reporter's hand. She bends at the knees to grab it but stares into the camera instead of looking down, where she would have seen the reason why she lost her mic. There was no reason for her to keep her attention on the camera. None!

This movie is just one frustrating scene after another. Drivers don't notice the baby on the road. Construction workers don't notice the baby on their site, nor do they notice Eddie, Norby and Veeko running around like idiots getting into all sorts of trouble Home Alone-style. Everyone in the background has been directed to look away at precise moments so they don't see what we see. Everything is carefully choreographed to trick us into believing that events in the foreground go unnoticed. It looks terrible. What's worse, Joe Mantegna and Joe Pantoliano try their hardest to pull this off. Try as they might, they cannot succeed. The script's senselessness curtails their attempts to play comedic villains caught up in a hopeless situation with any kind of conviction. John Hughes did much better with comedic villains in Home Alone and, yeah let's do it, let's toss in Home Alone 3 as well (I disliked the second one). What is the real explanation for this movie's failure? Everything I have described didn't happen by accident. It's all deliberate. What we are watching here is the universe apparently manipulating an entire city to preserve Baby Bink's survival.

I've always noted that a movie can be made about almost anything. I think a movie like this could be good, but John Hughes was not the person to make it happen. Maybe the hijinks of Baby's Day Out belong firmly in another era. Buster Keaton might have made something of the material. Certainly, a Looney Toons short would have made this entertaining. In 1994, this kind of story was probably long past its sell-by date. I hated watching this. The creative decisions made to accommodate the story made me shake my head in total disbelief. Seeing a young Cynthia Nixon pre-Sex in the City was the best thing to came out of this mess. Hughes passed away in 2009. The news made me sad. He wrote about teens when I was still a child, so his movies acted like a portal to what lay ahead. What would it be like to leave recess behind and move on to school dances? Would that even interest me? Hughes raised these questions, but his transition to family movies put an end to any further exploration. Instead, we got a dog named Beethoven. Most of Dennis the Menace was good, though that nasty third act ruined everything. Flubber was garbage, but Baby's Day Out won the race to the bottom.

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