Baby’s Day Out (1994)

Baby’s Day Out (1994)

7/10

Starring

Adam Robert Worton and Jacob Joseph Worton

Joe Mantegna

Brian Haley

Joe Pantoliano

Directed by Patrick Read Johnson

This was the good old ‘90s, when we didn’t need explosions or too much CGI to make us laugh. The characters were real and relatable, but the adventures were unbelievable. That was the style of the late John Hughes, who, through the ‘80s and ‘90s, gave us numerous films (Home Alone is one of them) that will forever be memorable in our hearts.

Baby’s Day Out was one of Hughes’ best movies, true to his style. I watched it enough times growing up, and I didn’t think that rewatching it twenty-three years after its release would still have me laughing my head off at the unrealistic and unbelievable adventure the baby takes us on.

Our adventure in this movie starts with a mother craving the attention other babies get from having their pictures in the local newspaper. She decides to hire a popular and expensive photography crew, hoping their track record of getting pictures in the paper will work for her baby.

A crew of bandits sees the same opportunity to kidnap a wealthy baby, and our mother and her husband are more than wealthy—and popular enough—to whet their appetite. They first hijack the photography crew, then go to the rich home. Using the mother’s obsession with perfection to distract her and her staff, they kidnap Baby Bink.

Now they have the baby, but here’s the catch: it’s a three-man crew where only one is intelligent enough to plan, and the other two aren’t that bright. The baby manages to crawl away from them while one of the bandits, who was supposed to read to the baby to make him fall asleep, ends up falling asleep himself. Now, the crew is chasing a crawling baby as he gets into malls, buses, taxis, zoos, and other places.

What I love about the bandits is their character. They’re not so bright that it’s unbelievable they’ve survived this long. They’re the right mix of dull and smart, and you can swear you’ve met someone like them at work or in your group of friends. The events and adventures are set up in such a way that you have to turn off your brain and just enjoy. Don’t bother yourself with how the baby found the old people’s home, how the lady on the bus didn’t notice the weight change in her bag, or why the adults at the filming didn’t care that a baby was crawling away. Just watch the movie and be entertained.

Upon its release, the movie was a critical and commercial failure for the late John Hughes, who had been behind great films like Home Alone, 101 Dalmatians, Flubber, and Maid in Manhattan, to name a few. However, the movie was a hit in Asia. As the late Robert Ebert commented, it was even more popular than Star Wars in Asia during its release. The movie also inspired numerous remakes in different Asian countries.

In Nigeria, where I’m from, the movie is seen among my peers as a great comedy. It made us laugh, and we all took turns rewatching it to make sure we didn’t miss a single scene of laughter.