SOURCE: Turan, Kenneth. “This Isn't Neverland.” Los Angeles Times (27 June 2001): F1.

In the following review, Turan offers a generally positive assessment of Baby Boy, but notes that the film is “at once too neat and too messy.”

Given the small number of major studio releases that focus on issues within the black community, let alone the specific segment Baby Boy deals with, it's easy to empathize with the sense of urgency writer-director John Singleton must have felt in making this compelling but problematic film.

Yet that same insistence seems to have influenced Singleton to be more of a polemicist than a dramatist, causing his seriocomic romantic melodrama to be wildly erratic and uneven. A story of Peter Pan in the 'hood, of a lost boy who can't or won't grow up, Baby Boy is heartfelt and personal as it attempts to deal with something real, but its increasing...