This could’ve been worse. I was really drawn to it in the hopes of more Goldbergian machinery as the trailer showed. Instead it’s just a buddy/road trip flick as the stork named Junior and human called Tulip travel to deliver a baby.
As the trailers illustrate, storks ditched the baby-delivery gig and became the couriers for an Amazon-like organization. Hunter (the ever great voice of Kelsey Grammer) led this transition and now he’s leaving for a sport on the corporate board. Junior is Hunter’s successor as long as he fires Tulip. Tulip isn’t really an employee, she’s really a baby the storks failed to deliver so they let her stay. Now Tulip is 18, they can legally ditch her. Obviously Junior can’t do it or there’d be no movie. Instead, the factory fires up and creates a baby which they decide to secretly hand over to the Gardner family. Hilarity ensues via physical humor, baby gags, being followed by a butt-kissing pigeon and a goofy pack of wolves led by Key & Peele.
For something done by the Warner Animation Group, this was disappointing. They gave us The Lego Movie. This is just standard drivel divorced dads patronize to kill a couple of hours during their weekend with the kids. Is it worth watching? Maybe once on cable or Netflix. Then it just joins the long list of options to keep children pacified in the back of the minivan on a long trip.
Alamo Extras: We got there pretty late so we just saw a couple cartoons playing up the stork-baby trope and some weird Dutch show with a chicken dance performance.