Baby’s Day Out (1994) Review

Official trailer

Baby’s Day Out is an awesome movie. It’s very funny, even for an adult, and I’ve watched it twice and laughed just as hard the second time. A baby escapes from three kidnappers and wanders across Chicago, and the men chasing him get punished by every building, bus and animal in the city.

John Hughes wrote and produced it, fresh off Home Alone, and Patrick Read Johnson directed. Joe Mantegna, Joe Pantoliano and Brian Haley play the kidnappers, Lara Flynn Boyle plays the mother, and twins Adam and Jacob Worton play Baby Bink. It came out in July 1994, cost about $48 million, and made only about $17 million in American theaters.

American audiences shrugged it off. Audiences in India didn’t, and the film became a television favorite there for decades. I’m with India on this one.

The Setup

Baby Bink is the son of a rich Chicago couple, and his favorite thing in the world is a picture book called Baby’s Day Out, about a baby touring the city. Three crooks posing as photographers from a baby magazine walk into the house, take pictures, and walk out with Bink. They get him to their hideout and start arguing about the ransom. While they argue, Bink crawls out the window. From there he follows the pages of his book, one stop at a time, and the kidnappers chase him through every one.

That’s the whole premise, and it’s a good one. The baby has no plan. He’s following a picture book. The joke is that a baby with no plan beats three grown men who have nothing but plans.

Three Kidnappers and No Brains

Joe Mantegna plays Eddie, the boss, and he’s the reason the film works. Mantegna had been in serious David Mamet pictures, and he plays Eddie with the same straight face, so every humiliation lands twice as hard. He never winks at the camera. He’s a professional having the worst day of his life. Joe Pantoliano plays Norby, who’s twitchy and mean, and Brian Haley plays Veeko, who’s a sweet idiot. The three of them bicker like a bad marriage, and their scenes in the hideout are as funny as the stunts.

I could watch these three argue in that hideout all day. Pantoliano’s twitchiness against Haley’s sweet stupidity is a great comic pairing, and Mantegna stuck between them, the only one who thinks this is serious business, makes me laugh before anybody’s fallen off anything.

The parents, Lara Flynn Boyle and Matthew Glave, are there to be frantic, and they’re good at it. Cynthia Nixon turns up as the nanny who read Bink that book one too many times. The film knows the kidnappers are the stars and gives them the room.

A Baby’s Tour of Chicago

Hughes loved Chicago, and the film shows it off. Bink rides a city bus, drifts through a department store, visits the zoo and ends up on the steel skeleton of a building under construction. The real city makes the cartoon feel grounded.

Each stop is a trap for the kidnappers. The baby passes through untouched while the grown men behind him walk into everything the location has to offer. You know it’s coming, and it’s still funny, because the film keeps finding a bigger way to pay it off.

The pacing is terrific. The film moves from set piece to set piece without dragging, and it never stops long enough for you to ask how a baby is surviving any of this.

The Gorilla and the Construction Site

The zoo sequence is the one everybody remembers. Bink crawls into the gorilla enclosure, the big silverback cradles him like a parent, and then Eddie climbs in after him. The gorilla doesn’t approve. What happens to Eddie next is Looney Tunes with a real ape.

The construction site tops it. Bink crawls along steel girders stories above the street while Eddie follows, and the building does to Eddie what Acme products do to Wile E. Coyote. Mantegna takes every fall with the dignity of a man who still thinks he’s in charge, and that’s funnier than the falls themselves.

None of it is realistic, and none of it tries to be. It’s slapstick in the old tradition, timed to the second and escalated every time, and the kid in the middle of it is completely unbothered.

The gorilla scene is my favorite thing in the movie. That ape cradling Bink so tenderly and then turning on Eddie is slapstick as pure as the old cartoons ever managed, and Mantegna’s face while it happens deserves a trophy of its own.

The Baby Is the Straight Man

Critics complained that a baby can’t carry a movie the way Kevin McCallister carried Home Alone, because a baby can’t plan or fight back. They had it backwards. The baby doesn’t need to fight back. The world takes care of him, and the joke is on the men who think they’re in charge.

That’s why it plays for adults. Kids laugh at the falls. Grown-ups laugh at three men with guns and a van being out-maneuvered by someone who can’t walk. Every scene is built on the same simple, perfect gag.

The Worton twins deserve credit too. Getting natural reactions from a nine-month-old is hard work, and the production pulled it off with careful blocking, doubles and effects. On screen, Bink just looks like a happy baby having a great day.

John Hughes, Late in the Run

Hughes spent the 1980s writing the teen comedies a whole generation grew up on, and Home Alone in 1990 made him the biggest name in family film. Baby’s Day Out was his attempt to find a new way into the same kind of chaos, with a hero even smaller and even less aware of the danger than Kevin McCallister.

You can feel his fingerprints all over it: the Chicago settings, the rich family that can’t keep track of its own child, the crooks who suffer more than any real person could. He knew exactly how to build a gag, and this film is packed with them.

The box office stung, and his career as a writer of big family hits slowed after it. That’s unfair, because I think the craft on display in this film is as sharp as anything he wrote, and the audience that did find it has kept it alive for thirty years.

Why America Missed It

The film opened in the summer of 1994 against much bigger family pictures and was marketed like a Home Alone sequel it wasn’t. It flopped, and it took some of the shine off Hughes’s run as the king of family comedy. The rest of the world had other ideas. The film became a staple of Indian television, where families watched it together year after year and quoted it for decades. Slapstick doesn’t need translating, and a baby needs no dialogue at all. I think the American verdict was wrong. It’s a gentler, sillier film than Home Alone, and it doesn’t pretend to be anything else. That’s exactly why it still works.

The Ending

The chase finally runs out of city, and it goes about as well for the kidnappers as everything else has. The three crooks end up in police custody in far worse shape than they started, and Bink ends up back in his mother’s arms. The film ends on a laugh and a hint that Bink has his eye on another adventure. That’s the right way to end a comedy: nobody learns a lesson, the bad guys get flattened, and the baby is ready to go again.

Craft Note

Is Baby’s Day Out worth watching?

Yes. It’s a big, silly, beautifully timed slapstick comedy with a baby at the center and three grown men getting what they deserve, and it’s funnier than its box office ever suggested. Kids will love it. Adults will laugh more than they expect to.

Watch it with family, and keep your eyes on Joe Mantegna in the gorilla scene. I give it a 10 because it sets out to make me laugh and does it from the kidnapping to the last girder, without a wasted gag or a single moment of mush. Home Alone gets the fame, and I’d happily put this one right beside it.

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