Gadgetry Galore! (Spy Kids (DVD))

Member Name: BringerX

Product:	Spy Kids (DVD)
Date:	04/05/01 (24 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: An hour and a half of fun packed film, Acting done by the little people

Disadvantages: My belly ached from the laughing

Effervescent and exceedingly proposterous, Robert Rodriguez's Spy Kids is more than a mere Austin Powers movie for sixth-graders — it's the kids' movie kids have been waiting for. Rodriguez creates a hellzapoppin' spy universe in which virtually anything can happen. All we know for sure is that it will happen fast; it will involve silly, quasi-high-tech gadgetry; and it won't take itself seriously for a millisecond.

Though not exactly a movie that readily recommends itself to adults, Spy Kids doesn't have a dull bone in its body. Rodriguez has always known how to push the speed limit on formula fun and his wackily designed movie has the pedal to the metal. Compared to Spy Kids, most other kids entertainment isn't even putting a strain on first gear. And that's exactly how movies created for this demographic should be: fast, cheap, and out of control. It's not The Wizard of Oz, but it'll do.

We first meet high-tech agents Gregorio and Ingrid (Antonio Banderas and Carla Gugino) in a bedtime-story flashback: Assigned to stalk each other, they instead fall in love and get married, only to have their nuptials assaulted by black-ops helicopters. Today, they're semi-retired, and even their precocious kids, Carmen and Juni (Alexa Vega and Daryl Sabara), don't know that behind Mom and Dad's bedroom vanities there's a phalanx of sci-fi hardware. Lured into taking another assignment, the parents are soon captured by evil genius and children's TV host Fegan Floop (Alan Cumming). Floop's twisted castle houses not only a glitch-ridden army of thumb-shaped robots, but also an army of robot children with empty skulls and reproducible faces — something sinister is plainly afoot.

The beauty of Spy Kids is that its plot could just as easily be made up of a thousand other good-natured absurdities. Rodriguez is going for giggles, and his McGuffins are outrageously arbitrary. The act
ing and dialogue (admirably, 100 percent free of fart, dog poop, boob, and fat lady jokes) are negligible, present merely to keep the loopy imagery and fruity set pieces aloft. Still, Rodriguez has made a movie for kids, and the most and least that can be said about it is that parents, while hardly being catered to, will experience profound relief that the movie knows how to entertain and does so. So will kids, I'm betting.

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