Okay, I was slightly too positive about this one in my first review. This has some really astonishingly awful passages that I struggled to sit through this time around, to call it cheesy is an understatement and to paraphrase Homer Simpson, “I’ve seen school plays that are better than this … honest to God, plays!!!!!” That said, I can’t deny that I’ll probably come back to it over and over again. Taylor Dooley is cute, the music is pretty awesome at times, and it does have the odd moment that really makes the hairs on my neck stand on end or just generally move me. The effects, though admittedly dodgy once the movie enters the 3-D section, are at least as ambitiously designed as they were in Spy Kids 3. Ultimately it has a kind of Last Mimzy-ish effect on me (though of course it’s nowhere near as good as that movie) – even when it’s at its most cheesy, when I’m practically sinking into my seat with cringing, there’s another voice in my mind just saying, “why not? why not be that cheesy?” And I can’t argue with that. Robert Rodriguez has yet to top the Spy Kids and Mariachi movies, he needs badly to step away from the green screen to get back on form again, but I’d rather watch this than Sin City or his Grindhouse segment any day of the week.

12th September, 2005:

This is actually a lot better than I expected, and better than its particularly cheesy concept would imply. It follows a similar pattern to Spy Kids 3: Game Over and kids should love it unless they’re already so jaded they require swears, sex, and violence. I love the ‘film by’ credit this time round, btw, “A Rodriguez Family Movie”.

The visual effects aren’t much advanced from Spy Kids 3, although the opening sequence, before they go 3-D, is promising. Once on the fantasy worlds, it’s all digital goo like before, though.

It’ll be a shame if they don’t crank out something else featuring these characters, be it another movie or a cartoon series or something, ‘cos they’re really nicely designed, like Demetra was in SK3. There’s hints of all kinds of things here, from The Wizard of Oz to The Matrix to the recent slew of superhero movies. I think anyone who digs comic book movies who doesn’t like this probably simply doesn’t like kids, ‘cos it’s kind of no different.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 19th, 2007 at 6:00 pm in 3 hearts, Movie Reviews. 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.