I kind of don’t see the point of this movie. It’s literally James Bond for kids, when we already have the Spy Kids trilogy, Harriet the Spy, and something even more similar, made quite a while ago, Teen Agent. I say this because Agent Cody Banks is aimed at kids who really wouldn’t tell the difference between any of the other movies … so any rehash seems like a total waste of space to me. Rent your kid Teen Agent – it even has the cheesy “Ooh! I have x-ray specs and I’m a teenager with hormones, what am I to do?” gag.

Now I’ve got the knee-jerk reaction out of the way, I’ll say: okay, it’s not that bad. It’s not bad at all, but that’s as good as it gets. Nice effects, a nice score from John Powell (only nice – it, too, is a rip-off, from his own Antz score). The only thing that is really surprising here is the production/costume design, which is pretty cool once you get in to the whole CIA area. Some of the costumes are like they’re out of a Gerry Anderson show or something. I kind of dug that.

Give me Spy Kids or Harriet the Spy any day, though, they had at least a little innovation in the film making department. They had to, I guess, they hadn’t the obviously high budget of this let-down.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 21st, 2004 at 2:01 pm in Movie Reviews, unrated. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.