"Baby Geniuses 3" - - Where's Casey Anthony When You Need Her?

A long while back, a good friend of mine named Santiago had confessed something horrible that was happening to him that he was powerless to stop.

"My daughter, all she ever wants to watch is Godzilla (The Matthew Broderick version). Three, four times a day, it's just on repeat."

I worked at a movie theater when "Godzilla" came out. One of the privileges of working there was the free movies. Well, one day I had some time to kill so I went to the theater. Two "good" movies were playing at the time: "Godzilla" and "Deep Impact." The problem was "Deep Impact" was in theater 9, and there was a dead rat in there. It had been in there for a few days and despite several attempts we couldn't find it's corpse. Theater 9 stank so bad people would ask for their money back. Now, when you smell, what you are actually doing is inhaling the microscopic particles of whatever is causing the smell. So I knew I had a choice between watching "Godzilla" or inhaling decaying rat guts for two and half hours.

"Deep Impact" was a pretty good movie.





You can say "you never saw 'Godzilla,' how do you know it was bad?' Well, I've also never been covered in molten lead but I'm pretty sure that's not any fun.  Working at the theater, I did have to go in from time to time to check on the audience so over the summer I saw enough of "Godzilla." But poor Santiago. He's a good dad so he suffered silently but I'm sure he died a little each time his daughter insisted they start it over.

"Baby Geniuses 3: Baby Geniuses And The Mystery Of The Crown Jewels" is a movie so terrible it must have been created by someone who hates parents. Forget safe sex education, show this movie in high school and no one will dare to have sex. Knowing this movie may be on repeat in their homes is enough to make blue balls look like a gift from God.

This is either a scene from "Baby Geniuses 3"
or a crime recreation from "America's Most Wanted."

"BG3" is the story of a bunch of babies who solve crimes. Crimes committed by other babies, I should add, so don't expect them to find out who was on the grassy knoll. It turns out that before babies know how to talk they understand the secrets of the universe. Why they waste this incredible talent on picking up pepperoni slices and analyzing them for DNA is never really explained but I guess a movie where four babies stand around discussing the meaning of life wouldn't allow for many fart jokes.

This movie is so cheap it defies explanation. I thought the green screen in "Axe Giant: The Wrath Of Paul Bunyan" was bad. This movie puts the "special" in special effects as the babies travel the world i.e. stand in front of photos taken from a tourist brochure.

"Welcome to France, the land without shadows!"

And for some odd reason every time they go to a country they start playing rock music while dancing on that nation's flag.

"America! Fuck Yeah!"

Please God, kill me now.

The bad decisions don't stop with the visuals. For one, the bad guy is a baby who hypnotizes people to do his bidding. This seems less like a magic trick and more like an excuse a child molester would use at his trial.

"I swear, you're honor! He made me do it. I was hypnotized!"

Actual Line In The Movie

Also, I get that every member of the team needs a specialty, and I'm going to sound really racist in about 8 words, but why is the master of disguise a black baby? First off, a baby already has a limited amount of things it cans disguise as, but make that baby black and you're left with two options: A black baby with a fake mustache or Cee Lo Green. There's another baby who is the "fashion expert" which seems equally as useless unless they need to infiltrate an episode of "Toddlers And Tiaras." Which, thankfully, they don't, but the random, and close up, shots of kids in diapers already seem creepy enough.

Directed By Jerry Sandusky

As the movie progresses, which is a word I use simply because minutes slowly pass and not because the plot goes anywhere, the babies travel the green screen looking for clues trying to figure out who stole the crown jewels, then a painting called the "Mona Larry," then a clock piece, and finally the world's biggest pizza, as they track down Big Baby. Big Baby is the aforementioned hypnotizer who builds a machine to make him grow big. Why? Because he doesn't like eating baby food. The machine needs the crown jewels to operate, but why the pizza? Why the painting? By the end Big Baby sounds less like a Bond villain and more like a total asshole who just likes to steal stuff.

EVERY SCENE goes like this: Something is stolen, the babies teleport into a cab and get harassed by a cab driver, go to the scene of the crime, find clues and recreate the crime, then find Big Baby in a Big Baby Burger restaurant and then he flies away in a helicopter till the next crime is committed. Every. Scene. They even use the same actors for all the fast food restaurants and the same cab driver.

Oh yes, the same cab driver is played by the one, the only, Academy Award winning Jon Voight

Instead of a picture of Jon Voight, here's a gif of the only good scene in the movie.

See, good old Jon, Angelina Jolie's dad and all around see-saw of acting credibility, was the bad guy in Baby Geniuses 2. Except it that one, his name was Kane. In this one he's a new bad guy named Moriarty which must make Sir Arthur Conan Doyle spin so hard in his grave a woman could have an orgasm if she leaned against his tombstone.

In the end, Big Baby is shrunk because the babies sabotage his Enlarging device, which seems odd. If I sabotaged a chainsaw it just stops working, it doesn't put the tree back together.

"Sure, kid. But after that I gotta drop you off at Richard Gere's house."

Anyways. after more endings than "Return Of The King" I am then given a message so dire, so terrifying, it must have come from Mount Doom itself.

For the record, the first "Baby Geniuses" was on of Roger Ebert's most hated films. One of the best quotes: "The movie involves a genius baby named Sly, who escapes from the lab and tries to organize fellow babies in revolt. The nauseating sight of little Sly on a disco floor, dressed in the white suit from "Saturday Night Fever'' and dancing to "Stayin' Alive,'' had me pawing under my seat for the bag my Subway Gardenburger came in, in case I felt the sudden need to recycle it." Read the full review here.

"Baby Geniuses 3: The Mystery Of The Crown Jewels" isn't the worst movie I've ever seen, but it is one of the most headache inducing. While I was watching it, I made the bad decision to move files from my hard dive to an external which only caused prolonged agony as the movie stuttered and stopped every 30 seconds. You may quip I need a faster a computer. My reply is my computer is fine, I just need a better pastime than reviewing films called "Baby Geniuses 3: The Mystery Of The Crown Jewels."