Despite what L. Ron Hubbard would have you believe, it's not easy being the hero of your own life. But in dreams, even in our waking ones, the sky's the limit.
That's something that kids know more than a little about. For proof, check out Robert Rodriguez' new The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl in 3D, a movie officially inspired by the dreams and fantasies of Rodriguez's 7-year-old son, Racer.
It's a toss-up, of course, whether your average 7-year-old is more in touch with his id than your typical, grown-up Hollywood screenwriter, but I'd put my money on the kid. In any event, much like the Spy Kids movies that Rodriguez previously co-conceived with his kids, Sharkboy and Lavagirl has an awful lot of fun tapping directly into something purely childlike. Grown-up film critics might slam the movie as silly, sloppy and inconsequential (which, in some ways, it is), but Sharkboy displays something that's often better than artistic savvy: an unpolished and (relatively) uncorrupted imagination instinctively in tune with that great divide between what is and what could be.
Our hero here is Max (Cayden Boyd), an ordinary 10-year-old with his head firmly in the clouds and his hand obsessively scribbling in an ever-present dream journal. The movie wastes no time demonstrating just how overrated reality is, with a tornado bringing Oz right to Kansas in the forms of Sharkboy and Lavagirl, the imaginary heroes of Max's dreams, who blow into the boy's classroom and whisk him away right in front of everyone's startled eyes. (Up to this point, the movie might have been mistaken for a kid-friendlier Harvey, with Max's fiery alien and amphibious mutant standing in for Jimmy Stewart's invisible giant rabbit.)
The boy and his super-powered pals wind up in a place called Planet Drool (a name sure to have the kiddies shrieking with delight), which turns out to be a repository for all of Max's accumulated dreams, good and bad, and where everyone from the boy's ordinary, daily existence shows up as some extraordinary version of themselves.
Mom and Dad are benign but clueless giants; a teacher and a local bully become costumed über-villains; Max himself ultimately transforms into some messianic Neo-esque champion; and, in the end, everybody returns home (in another Oz-like triple blink), only to find that there's no escaping dreams and the Emerald City is everywhere.
As the movie's title alerts us, the altered states of Sharkboy and Lavagirl's reality are indeed in 3D, and the bad news is that the technology still has some major kinks to be ironed out. You'll probably spend way too much time fiddling with your 3D glasses to get them to work properly, but when the effect does kick in, it's pretty great. In 3D, already surreal images (like a pack of skeletal, robotic hounds or a Train of Thought winding its way through a field of enormous, floating brains) become both astonishing art and the coolest ride in the amusement park.
Sure, you could argue that the movie is mostly enthusiasm and art direction upstaging Episode III-esque acting and dialogue, with a plot amounting to our heroes navigating various video game-like levels while propelling themselves toward a finish line. Pacing and logic just fly out the window, but what else would you expect from the subconscious mind of a pre-pubescent boy?
For all its goofiness and clumsiness, Sharkboy feels like the real deal, a barely mediated hot flash from the adolescent boy-brain, where young male dreamers face off atop enormous, phallic columns that keep extending heavenward in a pissing contest that goes on forever. I bet Bunuel and the original surrealists would have gone nuts over Sharkboy and Lavagirl, and you couldn't get a better endorsement than that – except maybe from your pre-schooler.
Racer Rodriguez might also have imagined the heroes of Mr. and Mrs. Smith – a seemingly ordinary married couple who turn out to be secret agents not so different from the parents in Spy Kids. The movie certainly boasts loads of cool gadgets, action and explosions that might have sprung fully formed from the reptilian psyche of a 7-year-old. But for all the sound and fury, Mr. and Mrs. Smith is a pretty listless affair, massaged by a Hollywood slickness that makes the whole thing a little obscene, and not in a good way.
Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie – and yes, it was during the shooting of this film that their notorious relationship reportedly gelled – play John and Jane Smith, a suburban couple who do typical couple things like chatting with neighbors about stocks and home decoration, and see a marriage counselor from time to time. There are some thinly veiled issues simmering away in the Smiths' relationship, you see, and all of that resentment comes to a boil when the two – who are really top-secret super-assassins – wind up in each other's professional sights.
There are some amusing moments of mutated domesticity here, and you gotta love the metaphor of the Smiths destroying their pristine yuppie homestead in the process of trying to eliminate one another, but the movie never really does much with its True Lies meets War of the Roses premise.
The basic story is routine and overlong (45-minute set-up, 45 minutes of protagonists fighting and chasing each other, followed by 30 minutes of them getting chased by others), and told with so little joy and spontaneity that even the frequent and considerable slugfests feel a bit, well, sluggish.
The main thing the movie has going for it is its star power, but even that turns out to be problematic. Pitt and Jolie are all chiseled cheekbones, full voluptuous lips and piercing blue eyes, but the film makes the critical mistake of reveling in its actors' larger-than-life presences right off the bat, before even bothering to convince us of their characters' ordinariness.
Since we never really believe these people are remotely average, there's nothing particularly exciting about it when the couple's extraordinariness is eventually revealed. That's the sort of rookie mistake that Sharkboy and Lavagirl would never make, and it's a fatal blow from which this all-too-ordinary project never fully recovers.
lance.goldenberg@weeklyplanet.com
This article appears in Jun 8-14, 2005.
