The Boss Baby may remind you of Donald Trump. But that’s just a coincidence

Run through The Boss Baby cheat sheet and you might reasonably conclude that this DreamWorks' animation has accidentally become the right film at the right time. Alec Baldwin provides the voice for a tyrannical baby in a business suit who spreads terror across an increasingly desperate household.

Admit it. You've got that image of Trump in a truck at the front of your brain. Serendipity is rarely so delicious. Baldwin would have recorded his lines long before he began impersonating the other Boss Baby for Saturday Night Live.

The surprise is that there’s very little of That Donald in this ho-hum family film. The Boss Baby is too well organised. He’s too disciplined. He’s too firmly on message. Perhaps this offers spicier comment than any deliberate satire could hope to achieve. Trump really is more ludicrous and infantile than the silly baby in the Easter Holiday treat.

There are larger structural issues. Based on Marla Frazee's book, the film seeks to educate children about the challenges and rewards of having a new baby in the house. Coy about sex, The Boss Baby imagines that the little ones are delivered from a clinical institution apparently modelled on the Archers' version of heaven in A Matter of Life and Death.

This particular infant is more demanding than most. Aggressive, belligerent and unyielding, he is soon ordering the house like . . . Well, very much in the way that Donald Trump has failed to do.

Here’s the problem. A few shots from the parents’ perspective – showing us a baby that looks like a baby – suggest that the tycoon version is a figment of his older brother’s imagination. But an unnecessarily complex plot involving an evil pet magnate makes so much of the Boss’s business skills that the fantastic angle becomes increasingly deadened. Put simply, it’s very hard to know what’s real and what’s not.

Oh well. The jokes are spicy. The animation is satisfactory after a sub-Pixar fashion. And the eventual moral is sound. You’ve endured worse.