Flak Magazine: Review of Spy Kids, 4-5-01

Unlike almost any of the other late-'90s Wunderkinder, Robert Rodriguez came onto the scene as an exceptional film talent who was also a straight-up popular artist. Instantly famous for making the gleeful action fest El Mariachi for ludicrously little money, he went on to remake it on a larger scale for Hollywood in the less-magical Desperado. Then came 30 minutes of laughing gas in Four Rooms, the rocky Quentin Tarantino collaboration From Dusk Till Dawn, and the groansome The Faculty — it's been a career on the decline. By pretty much every Hollywood metric, he had one last chance before deemed a flameout.

So it's my pleasure to announce that Spy Kids is great. I'd say the movie is almost overpraised, but as a fan of Rodriguez, the movie's writer/ director/ producer/ editor/ visual effects supervisor/ composer, it's a great thrill to be arguing that the critics like his movie too much. Its faults are curious and forgivable, and its pleasures are positively gold-plated.

The movie opens on Carmen and Juni Cortez (Alexa Vega and Daryl Sabara) being told a bedtime story by their mother Ingrid (Carla Gugino) about two international super spies that gave up a life of espionage for the most difficult mission of all: raising a family. Carmen objects, saying the story needs a better ending, but of course we realize long before the kids do that it's their parents' story and that getting to the "better ending" is going to be all the fun.

To that end, Ingrid and her husband Gregorio (Antonio Banderas) are brought out for, you know, one last assignment, only to be kidnaped by Floop (Alan Cumming), a Pee-Wee-cum-Willy Wonka children's show host who's also a mad genius contracted by the diabolical Mr. Lisp (Robert Patrick) to come up with, you know, some way to take over the world. Floop's solution: child-impersonating killer androids who only need a brain — or, rather, the breakthrough Third Brain A.I. that Gregorio was developing — to replace the scions of all the world leaders.

With their parents gone, it's up to Carmen and Juni to save them, and so they get a crash course in the family business. It's high fun, harnessing Rodriguez's indefatigable sense of play as well as his rock-'em-sock-'em style that's equal parts textbook and comic book. (His cost-trimming special effects often look home-brewed, however, like he didn't have quite enough memory on his Mac to put the proper polish on it.) Whether it's the kids' gadget-based hijinks or their run-ins with acid-trip Pufnstuf creations like the Thumb-Thumbs and the Flooglies, Spy Kids crackles with childlike inventiveness.

That, perhaps, goes a long way in explaining the little ways in which the movie's seams show. At the risk of spoiling the plot, as it were, Floop turns out to be not such a bad guy; he's supplanted in that regard by his sidekick, Alex Minion (the ubiquitous but undervalued Tony Shalhoub — the movie's got a perfect cast). Not only does the movie swap out its bad guy, but between the kids, the parents, Floop, Minion, Mr. Lisp, the Thumb-Thumbs and the li'l androids, the movie's sundry conflicts peter out into one long anti-climax in which our heroes do very little. It's Floop who provides the masterstroke against the villains, and while he praises Juni for enlightening him, it's a shallow resolution — maybe Rodriguez sees too much of himself in Floop to stick him with an arch-enemy rap. Floop, with his self-sufficient believe-in-yourself mantras, was a truly subversive choice for a bad guy in a movie where the heroes are marked most by their dependency on family. The route the movie takes instead is a disappointing, but not capsizing, shortcoming.

In the same way that True Lies drove the point home that your spouse can be both your fantasy and all the adventure you'll ever need, Spy Kids is totally serious about its claim that keeping a family together is the real challenge. Add to that the fact that the Cortezes are, well, the Cortezes — non-Anglo — and that the kids are shown literally warts and all and you have a truly unique motion picture. It's likely to become a kid's classic, a box-office success and a franchise — and it couldn't happen to a nicer movie, or be a better break for a filmmaker in line for a second chance.

— Sean Weitner (sean@flakmag.com)