Movie Review : ‘Baby’s Day’: Peewee’s Big Adventure

“Baby’s Day Out” is one of those frenetic John Hughes ideas that manages to seem uproarious and cruel at the same time. It’s another entry in his kiddie specialty--clobber comedies featuring people without nervous systems. He’s making animated features without the animation.

Nine-month-old Baby Bink (played alternately by identical twins Adam Robert and Jacob Joseph Worton) has been whisked from his well-to-do parents (Lara Flynn Boyle and Matthew Glave) by a trio of bumbling kidnapers (Joe Mantegna, Joe Pantoliano, Brian Haley) who proceed to lose the baby in the middle of Chicago’s hubbub.

If you were upset by the scene in the Coen brothers’ “Raising Arizona” where the kidnaped baby is left unattended in the middle of a highway, you’ll positively blanch at “Baby’s Day Out,” where Baby Bink is allowed to crawl through and under traffic, get whisked through revolving doors, waddle across a thin plank hundreds of feet in the air, swing out on a steel girder, nestle with a caged gorilla--for starters.

Hughes, whose script was directed by Patrick Read Johnson, buys off the queasiness one may feel at all this unsupervised mayhem by making Baby Bink obliviously happy. Bink is delighted to be on this daylong outing--it’s like a full-scale re-enactment of one of his nursery book jaunts.

Either you buy into this slapstick bliss or you reject the movie altogether. It’s the same choice we were offered by “Home Alone,” where an accidentally abandoned child is terrorized by a pair of scurvy housebreakers. Hughes and Johnson are so adept at turning this peewee and his tormentors into comic cut-ups that the maliciousness at the movie’s center never really takes hold.

*

What registers instead are the occasional heart tugs. Hughes’ movies would be better if they were even nastier: They lack the courage of their own heartlessness. As Bink’s mother, Lara Flynn Boyle plays a high-society matron who initially regards her baby as a kind of cuddly ornament; she wants his picture taken for the newspaper society pages. It’s the baby’s nanny (Cynthia Nixon) who instinctively knows where the lost baby is heading. That’s because she’s untainted by riches. (The movie plays up her maternal gifts only to give her short shrift at the end.) Baby Bink himself is a snuggly-wuggly cherub without a yowling moment. He’s much too good for his parents. (His experience, of course, teaches them to be better parents.)

The filmmakers are clever at concocting ways for Baby Bink to get fed and diaper-changed while paddling about the city on all fours. They manage to anticipate most of our literal-minded objections--which helps to ground the plot’s outlandishness. As the kidnapers, Mantegna, Pantoliano and Haley are adept clobber comics, and they fit right into the cartoonish landscapes. Chicago--courtesy of visual effects supervisor Mike Fink--is transformed into an anything-goes wonder world where giggly babies atop skyscrapers can swing out over the city with aplomb.

When this sort of stuff works, as it does a fair amount of the time in “Baby’s Day Out,” it points up how much can be done with state-of-the-art special effects. “Baby’s Day Out” could not have been made nearly as well even five years ago. (Whether it should be made is another story.) Nowadays just about anything that once was visualized as animation can be duplicated as live-action. And for an in-your-face comedy master blaster like Hughes, the live-action mode is the best way to pin us to the wall. If the Three Stooges were alive today, not to mention Baby Leroy, he’d have them waddling and bludgeoning in eye-popping hyperspace.

* MPAA rating: PG, for mild language and comic action. Times guidelines: It includes a kidnaping and many scenes of a baby endangered by a gorilla, flying objects and hurtling cars that may terrify the very young..

‘Baby’s Day Out’

Duane Martin: Kyle

Joe Mantegna: Eddie

Lara Flynn Boyle: Laraine

Joe Pantoliano: Norby

A 20th Century Fox release. Director Patrick Read Johnson. Producers John Hughes and Richard Vane. Executive producer William Ryan. Screenplay by John Hughes. Cinematographer Thomas E. Ackerman. Editors David Rawlins. Costumes Lisa Jensen. Music Bruce Broughton. Production design Doug Kraner. Set decorator Beth Rubino. Running time: 1 hour, 48 minutes.

* In general release throughout Southern California.