Baby Geniuses Reviews

Preposterously different approaches to child rearing are pitted against each other in this formulaic and deeply unfunny LOOK WHO'S TALKING knockoff. Dr. Elena Kinder (Kathleen Turner) owns BABYCO, the world's largest manufacturer of baby products, but also runs a secret research lab where she and Dr. Heep (Christopher Lloyd) hope to decipher the sophisticated language Kinder believes is buried in baby talk. In their lamely futuristic lair, Heep and Kinder take kids they've raised from infancy and hook them up to electrodes, just so you know they're bad, bad, bad. In fact, the kids actually do have a language of their own, as well as a superior baby intelligence they lose when they begin acquiring adult language. In order to study the old nature vs. nurture debate, Kinder separates twins Whit and Sly (played by triplets Leo, Myles and Gerry Fitzgerald), holding onto Sly while handing off Whit to her niece Robin (Kim Cattrall). Robin and her benevolent husband Dan (Peter MacNicol) run the paradisiacal Bobbins Nursery, and Dan has independently come to the conclusion that the toddlers have their own mode of communication. The mischievous Sly eventually escapes Kinder's laboratory and winds up at the mall, face to face with Whit. One predictable mistaken-identity plot twist later, poor Whit is Kinder's lab while Sly schemes to expose her baby-experimentation racket. The filmmakers try to wring so much maudlin, knee-jerk sentimentality out of their little kids that to describe the movie's tone as "forced" would be an understatement. Parents will be terrified by the scene that sets Sly loose on the city streets (courtesy of cheap CGI effects), and probably won't much cotton to the generally distasteful theme of children being held against their will. Turner chews up the scenery in a Cruella DeVil mode that does neither her or the movie much good.