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Spy Kids 3D: Game Over
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For
those who have ever gone cross-eyed or felt the first throb of a migraine after
peering into a Magic Eye puzzle, this third film in Robert Rodriguez’s Spy Kids series should probably come
with a health warning attached.
I
spent half the running time of this terrible movie experimenting with the
souvenir 3D glasses handed out at the candy bar. Should they be worn over,
under, or in place of my regular spectacles? Alas, no arrangement could
guarantee the successful union of colour, focus and three-dimensional
immersion.
Not
that there’s much to be immersed in. A throwback to naïve techno-fantasies of
the ‘80s like Electric Dreams (1984), the
plot hurls young Juni (Daryl Sabara) into a video game to recover his older
sister, Carmen (Alexa Vega, who sings a pleasant pop tune over the closing
credits). The presiding cyber-villain
(split into four figures trying desperately to out-mug each other) is Toymaker
(Sylvester Stallone), and his rendezvous with destiny comes in the form of
Juni’s Grandpa (Ricardo Montalban).
However,
every turn in the get-to-the-next-game-level intrigue is overwhelmed by the
lumbering obligations imposed by the 3D technology which hardly seems to have
advanced since the 1950s. Actors stare blankly into space and make frantic
grabs at special effects whose sole raison d’etre is to shoot into the bulging
foreground.
Rodriguez
(Desperado,
1995) was once a promising filmmaker but, like so many of his Miramaxed
generation, he is now running on empty. The steep decline between the freshness
of the first Spy Kids (2001) story and this self-titled ‘End Game’ can be gauged in
the way it treats the theme of family.
In Spy Kids this was a novel, spirited,
even moving theme, especially in the way parents and children bonded through
their mutual, outrageous adventure. Here, the adults (Carla Gugino and Antonio
Banderas) are reduced to mere cameos, rendering the final chant (“To family!”)
hollow. And even the gormless Juni greets the handy wisdom that “Everyone is
family” with appropriate scepticism: “But that’s meaningless!”
MORE pre-teen movies: BMX Bandits, Max Keeble's Big Move © Adrian Martin January 2004 |
