Baby on Board Reviews

Frenetic and forgettable slapstick, BABY ON BOARD fails to give its tired material any fresh twist, relies too heavily on broad ethnic stereotypes, and wastes the talents of its two stars. In New York City, Maria (Carol Kane), widow of a slain criminal, prepares to shoot the prominent Mafioso who killed her husband. Following him to the airport, she changes her mind at the last minute, but someone bumps into her and she accidentally kills him after all. Her target was the nephew of Don Carmine (Geza Kovacs), who orders his henchman to execute Maria and her infant girl in retaliation. Maria flags down a cabbie named Ernest (Judge Reinhold), and while being chased throughout the city by Carmine's cohorts, the fugitives fall in love. Carmine eventually manages to capture Maria and the child, but Ernest meanwhile rescues a mob associate who Carmine had tried to drown, and they team up to save Maria and tip-off the police about Carmine. Carol Kane and Judge Reinhold are two veteran performers of agreeably off-kilter appeal, the sort that routine moviemakers have no idea how to handle, and this Canadian production makes no exception. The pair plod through the tired material like troupers, with Kane attractive and even a little spooky as the vengeful heroine until the script opts for cartoony fun on the run. The menacing mobsters are all old ethnic cliches of chunky, carnation-wearing, heavy-lidded Italians obsessed with payback and "respect," although the stereotypes seem no less pernicious for the bland tone of the film. It's also clear that (the first gangster casualty notwithstanding) nobody's really going to get hurt, making the threat that drives this rickety vehicle completely hollow. Even Carmine's declared method of dispatching his enemies is bloodless--choking by swallowing a rubber ball. The potential for comedy in the army of idiosyncratic fellow cabbies that Ernest calls on for help is sadly underused. The most that's achieved from this multicultural melange of eccentrics is a cacophony of voices on the taxi's radio forming an idiot Greek chorus, although there are plenty of good-natured gags about New York's racial mosaic of immigrants (with Toronto standing in for New York). Less acceptable is the horribly mismatched and overexposed film footage, indicating that the taxi-bound film crew never mastered the art of cinematography inside a cramped, moving vehicle in daylight. (Violence, profanity.)