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'Spy Kids'
Get another opinion: • Share Your Opinion Starring: Alexa Vega, Daryl Sabara, Antonio Banderas, Carla Gugino Director: Robert Rodriguez MPAA rating: PG for action sequences Running time: 90 minutes Release date: 03/30/01
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Rodriguez packs latest with goofy goodness and family Bond-ing
By Chris Garcia
American-Statesman Film Critic
Originally Posted: March 30, 2001
When you step into a Robert Rodriguez movie, you slip on a banana peel into loopy mayhem and whiplash goofs. Rodriguez brings his imagination to life with the embellished bedlam of cartoons, and things can get messy. In the violent larks "Desperado" and "From Dusk Till Dawn," it's hard to tell where coherence begins and visual overabundance ends. His films are calisthenics for the eyes that get by on their generous sense of fun.
Rodriguez, who is only 32, has always seemed suited to children's pictures. Except for his witty, kiddy episode in "Four Rooms," the director's Hollywood features, including the Austin-made "The Faculty," were aimed at teen-age boys who savor dumb quips and blood squibs over story and character. The movies felt like mercenary projects on which the far-smarter Rodriguez (who did not write "Dusk" or "Faculty") seemed to be stooping.
All that has changed with "Spy Kids," a clever, funny, rollicking family flick that never tries too hard to be hip and never fails to briskly enchant. Harking back to "Bedhead," his charming college short about precocious kids, Rodriguez has set his sights where his heart is. Beneath the movie's James Bondian riot of intrigue, geegaws and adventure lies a shockingly quaint lesson about the importance of keeping a family together. Who woulda thunk?
"Spy Kids" is the writer-director's most accomplished work to date (his best remains the $7,000 wonder "El Mariachi"). It's as good for what it is as for what it's not. The story is fond formula pastiche, a Gobstopper of classic spy flicks and kid's movies, without freeze-dried committee writing that renders most family films soulless gruel.
Children's movies such as "Stuart Little" and "Inspector Gadget" were, to this reviewer, cynical misfires made by test-market drones clueless to what real kids and (this is key) their parents crave in entertainment. Flash and cutes won't cut it. A little heart goes a long way. Rodriguez gets it, and in this he has more in common with the folks at Disney and Pixar ("Toy Story").
"Spy Kids" honors the secret agent genre by spoofing it. Mom and Dad (Carla Gugino and Antonio Banderas, both sexy-sleek and awfully game) are real government spies, but it's their unwitting offspring who save the world and the family unit. (In Rodriguez's misty eyes, family is the world.)
Alexa Vega and Daryl Sabara play the Cortez kids, Carmen and Juni, who don't know their parents' true occupation. Until, that is, the kids are hurtled into the Spy Pod, madly pursued by nasty Fegan Floop's minions, who are after the top secret Third Brain. The chase is their initiation into spydom. Equipped with a depot of elaborate gadgets (most designed by Rodriguez), they take it upon themselves to rescue their parents from the twisted clutches of Floop (swishy Alan Cumming channeling Willy Wonka), the pratfalling Thumb-Thumbs (truly all thumbs) and a glassy-eyed battalion of Robot Kids.
It's elementary stuff, and Rodriguez knows it. How he reimagines the archetypes is the film's trump. Rodriguez never overreaches for the big laugh, and he's not afraid to be silly. The father of three little ones knows his audience. Carmen and Juni's surly banter has an authentic ring ("Why are you dressed like a geek?"), free of the false erudition with which so many screen kids speak.
Rodriguez, whose six credits include special-effects supervisor, and Austin production designer Cary White devise a wondrous universe equally evoking "Austin Powers," "Pee-Wee's Playhouse" and "The Banana Splits." Though some have a cheesy shimmer, the largely convincing effects are both low- and high-tech: virtual reality by way of Play-Doh.
(And for those of you who cursed road closings at Fourth and Lavaca streets last spring, know that Austin was put to good use, from cameos by Richard Linklater and Mike Judge, to flattering shots of Lake Travis and the downtown skyline.)
His bid for wholesomeness leads Rodriguez to overplay the family bonding theme, and no scene tops the masterful and hilariously thrilling wedding scene opener. But the caper stays intoxicated on the director's pursuit of the next cinematic rush, which he always gets. With "Spy Kids," Rodriguez is the rare filmmaker who has captured exactly what he was after.
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