Painful for all involved

The first meeting between Joe Mantegna and the baby of “Baby’s Day Out” begins with a kick to the crotch and I guess that’s John Hughes setting the tone for this one early. Like a mix of “Home Alone”, “The Three Stooges”, and everything that might have inspired those Baby Herman cartoons in “Who Framed Roger Rabbit”, “Baby’s Day Out” is actually just painful. Not to anyone under ten or who can fathom unimaginable pain but for those who would rather wince than laugh or witness people getting constantly pummeled with no end in sight then this is the movie for you. All 99 excruciating minutes of it.


Mantegna, Joe Pantoliano, and Brian Haley play three crooks pretending to be baby photographers so that they can steal Baby Bink, the only child of the millionaire Cotwells (Lara Flynn Boyle, Mathew Glave). But the kidnappers are bumblers and soon Bink, inspired by his favorite children’s book, is intent to explore the city of Chicago with the kidnappers all trying to get him back.


The kid crawls through the city; on streets, into traffic, across boards connecting one building’s roof to another, and onto the scaffolding of a construction site which is then lifted with the kid dangling on the edge. Hughes assures us that the kid will always be fine-sometimes even the saves he comes up with are somewhat clever. Still, it’s hard to find all the near-miss sliding, climbing, and almost getting hit by cars all that funny. There is too much realism here to really admire the cartoonishness of it.


All the shots taken by the bad guys are horrendous too, especially by Mantegna. I felt bad for his crotch on multiple occasions- especially one setpiece that goes way overlong where the baby not only holds his balls in a vice grip but then sets them on fire with a lighter. These characters get slapped, slammed, flattened, and fall from great heights in scenes that should really end in their death but instead just ends with a loud sound effect that makes us wince and a sad reminder that this person is probably going to get up and take another pummeling punishment again within a couple scenes.


There’s one moment that works, where the three are trying to get the kid out of the gorilla cage at the zoo. There is some suspense to it. The rest of this is just constant slapstick done in a predictable, too easy fashion. All Mantegna, Pantaliano, and Haley can do is emote the same over the top, pained expression over and over again. And after about half an hour, I felt more like identifying with that than laughing at it.