The young stars of Spy Kids 2 have aged a little since the original Spy Kids, but haven't we all? It's no crime to get older (a sin, yes, but not exactly a crime), but neither is it a heck of a lot of fun — unless, of course, you're a spy kid.
In the year or so since the first movie, Daryl Sabara, the curly-headed muppet who plays Juni Cortez, has lost a lot of that doughy adorability that made his performance in Spy Kids so effortlessly appealing. Alexa Vega, who plays Juni's big sister Carmen, is barely a kid at all anymore. The new movie doesn't make that big a deal of it, but Vega/Cortez is seeming as much like an adult as she is a child these days. She's already developing not-so-secret crushes (among other things), and has a curiously grown-up and self-aware look on her face half the time, as if she's becoming just the slightest bit uncomfortable at being identified with a proudly kid-oriented project like this. She even gets to strut her stuff a bit, performing a thoroughly gratuitous, thoroughly Britney-esque, old-beyond-her-years musical number over the closing credits.
The good news is that none of this really takes away from the sheer fun factor of Spy Kids 2: The Island of Lost Dreams. Just to get the caveats out of the way, this is even more of a "turn your brain off at the door and just enjoy it" sort of affair than the first one, but if you're down with that, the sky's the limit.
The kids are older, yes, but that's all part of writer/director/conceptual guru Robert Rodriguez's plan. Rodriguez is something of a kid himself, but he also has three young boys of his own — Rocket, Racer and Rebel, believe it or not — and he clearly pays a lot of attention to what they're into, from the rhythms of their lives to the sorts of movies they like. Just as Spy Kids reflected the interests of Rodriguez's kids a year or so ago, so does the sequel seem perfectly in synch with the slightly more, uh, sophisticated tastes that have doubtless developed in their percolating little brains over the past 12 months.
Like its predecessor, Spy Kids 2 is an unapologetically silly little romp that's so full of energy and sincerity it's almost impossible to dislike. It's not a great movie, but it's a pretty darned good kids' movie, because it does what it does very well and, most important of all, it almost never condescends to its audience. It may not mean very much, but it means what it means with the very essence of its being.
Look hard enough, of course, and you'll find a whiff or three of irony tucked away in the movie, too. Even there, though, this is less about betraying the movie's kid-friendly perspective than simply being in tune with the basic needs of an adult audience. After all, try as he might, Rodriguez is himself still technically an adult.
Grown-ups are even less in evidence in Spy Kids 2 than in the original. In the first film, parental units and former secret agents Antonio Banderas and Carla Gugino came out of retirement and were immediately abducted by bad guys, only to reappear in the final act to back up their heroic offspring. In the sequel, Banderas and just about everybody else over the age of 12 barely make it out of the starting gate, relegated as they are to basically functioning as window dressing for the young'uns. After all, it's the kids' show.
Spy Kids 2 has its problems, beginning with the fact that there's no villain this time to measure up to the always colorful Alan Cumming and company from the original. Beavis and Butt-head creator Mike Judge is totally forgettable as the chief baddie in SK2, and Steve Buscemi, who's not actually a villain at all, is watchable but too laid-back and predictably quirky. Still, the movie's patented blend of Harry Potter, James Bond, Tim Burton and Dr. Seuss is as enjoyable as ever. It's a mix made even sweeter by the addition of a healthy serving of Ray Harryhausen, since the titular island turns out to be populated by weird stop-motion animated creatures and battling skeletons straight out of The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad.
As in the first time around, there's not much story here, but plenty of zingy action, cool gadgets, scary monsters (but not too scary), fabulous eye candy and sheer momentum. As for the human element, we get cameos by Ricardo Montalban and Holland Taylor as the spy kids' maternal grandparents, and a little bit of youthful rivalry between Carmen and Juni (now official, full-fledged agents) and the ambitious, sneaky Gerri and Gerti Giggles (Matthew O'Leary and Emily Osment). Mostly, though, we simply get the spy kids zipping around taking care of business, and another tale of dastardly dudes plotting world domination.
Best of all, we get an ending that, for once, doesn't seem to be setting us up for a sequel. Even though we know in our heart of hearts that one is already in the works.
X-Man If you think Spy Kids 2 sounds like so much dopey eye candy, wait till you see XXX. This is a movie that's so ridiculous, in fact, that it's practically guaranteed to be a hit. Within the first few minutes alone we're treated to the spectacle of a guy driving a red Corvette off a bridge, a corpse being passed along a sea of hands in a mosh pit, and a speed-metal guitarist spitting fire from some sort of prosthetic contraption attached to his mouth. I mean, how cool is that?
XXX is like Requiem for a Dream and a lot of other contemporary movies that work on us like a drug, and the abusive substance it most wants to emulate is methamphetamine. The movie is rarely content just to suck all the air out of our lungs; it's apparently only truly happy when it's also strobing images at us and whipping our upper bodies around in our chairs in a near-perfect simulation of a drug rush and hangover. XXX is so relentlessly forward-propelled that we hardly even have a chance to catch our breath and realize how utterly idiotic it all is.
Vin Diesel is the star here, and he's very much in the mold of other terrible actors who get paid to anchor big, comic book movies (think Keanu in The Matrix or Arnold in almost anything). Diesel (who names these guys, anyway?) plays Xander Cage, X for short, a bald, tattooed slab of flesh given to looking straight into the camera and screaming lines like, "I live for this shit!" X is a subversive but basically goodhearted fringe dweller who also happens to be a former extreme sports celebrity. Enter Samuel L. Jackson, in a wig and with latex scar tissue over half his face, as an NSA agent looking for fresh blood to combat a group of international bad guys.
Jackson's character sends X to the fashionably seedy burg of Prague, where the outlaw athlete quickly infiltrates the bad guys' group and spends the rest of movie striding around in a ratty sheepskin coat, pulling off outrageous stunts and shouting glib catch phrases while clobbering baddies and saving the world.
Weirdly enough, XXX bears a striking resemblance to any number of James Bond flicks you probably remember, radically mutated of course, but still recognizable. In fact, if the Spy Kids movies are Bonds for the babies of baby boomers, then XXX is 007 for today's antisocial 12-to-twentysomething set. You might even say Diesel's X is the anti-Bond, as grubby and proletariat as Connery's 007 was snobby-suave and martini cool.
Both love their toys and bad puns, though, and both have an eye for the ladies and a mild problem with authority. So who's to say which is the guiltiest pleasure? Far be it for this lowly reviewer to be the bearer of sad tidings, but for a lot of folks out there, fast and furious and a sleeveless T has slow and cool and a freshly pressed tux beat any day.
Lance Goldenberg can be reached at lance.goldenberg@weeklyplanet.com or 813-248-8888, ext. 157.
This article appears in Aug 7-13, 2002.