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Poster (c) Buena Vista
After witnessing the atrocity named Spy Kids 2: Island of Lost Dreams, I vowed never to give any money to the franchise. And then I found myself in line waiting to buy a ticket for Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over only for the 3-D aspect of it. And then I thought, “It can’t be as bad as the second.” Well, it isn’t. However, it overstays its short welcome of 90 minutes, and underutilizes its opportunity for the third dimension, but I’ll get to that later. With a plot harder to follow than The Matrix and stupider than any other summer sequel, it calls for desperate actions.
The spy kid who looks less a kid but more a chipmunk, Juni Cortez (Daryl Sabara) has now retired from the OSS and is working as a P.I. in a painfully unfunny sketch as homage to film-noir. However, he’s called back because his sister Carmen (Alexa Vega) is trapped inside of a video game called “Game Over”, which’ll be the biggest game ever. So Juni has to go inside of the game to rescue his sister while shutting down the game, run by the wicked Toymaker (Sly Stallone).
Spy Kids 3 would’ve worked as a 10-minute ride at Disney World. 3-D rides are always fun. However, when you’re in an uncomfortable seat for 90 minutes with uncomfortable glasses over your real glasses looking at flashing colors, that’s not good. It’s basically a special effects piece. The characters were basically Photoshopped onto FX bodies and moved around. It’s faker than Joan Rivers. The video game world looked wonderful, like a giant computer game (really…), but the plot was so convoluted that it was impossible to believe. The 3-D aspect of it didn’t really work, either. The whole purpose of the 3-D glasses and the extra time to make it into the third dimension is to have things shoot out at you. The main thing that the glasses did was to have everything look a little out of the screen, but barely recognizable. When something did fly at you, it was usually metal bolts, which became boring after awhile.
George Clooney was one of the best actors of 2002 in Solaris. Antonio Banderas is a good action star. Mike Judge is a genius at comedy. Salma Hayek’s really hot. Alan Cumming was in X2. Tony Shalhoub is great in TV’s Monk. Steve Buscemi is one of the greatest underated actors out there. Bill Paxton is a good all-around actor. Elijah Wood makes tons of money from Lord of the Rings. What do they all have in common? They sold out to a big-budget Disney movie that’s a second sequel from the original two years ago! Why oh why would they do that? They don’t need the extra publicity. It wasn’t as if they needed their name out there, nor an extra paycheck. It wasn’t a funny cameo like in Austin Powers in Goldmember. It was a stupid cameo.
As I was watching Spy Kids 3-D, a scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail kept on popping into my head. A town square has eager men waiting to burn a witch. However, the hangman doesn’t believe she is a witch, so he’s trying to persuade the townspeople that she isn’t a witch. Witches float, so he asks, “What else floats in water?” King Arthur says, “Wood.” And that’s the perfect adjective to describe its acting. After the success of Haley Joel Osment (whose sister appears in Spy Kids 3-D) in The Sixth Sense, everyone thinks that all kids are terrific actors, when, in fact, better acting is seen at a rehearsal for a grade school play. At times, cuteness can sell a movie, but face it, these spy kids are no longer kids! They’re pre-teens and losing their appeal. This means one thing for sure: no Spy Kids 4
Robert Rodriguez is a one-man show. He can direct! He can produce! He can film! He can edit! He can compose! He can’t make a good 3-D movie, though!
Rated PG for action sequences and peril.
Review Date: July 26, 2003