Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over (2003)

Spy Kids 3D: Game Over

  Avoid at All Costs

My friend was not hired to work on this film so I was feeling negative about it - but now I am grateful he is saved from the besmirchment and humiliation (not to mention actually having to handle the stuff!) I really enjoyed the first Spy Kids, and to a degree the second one, for their childlike sense of fun and wonder and joy. This movie infuriated me, insulted me, bored me, and depressed me. The nice lady who organizes the screenings asked me afterwards what I thought, and I could only grin grimly. "It is what it is, huh," she laughed. I was too polite to say, "And it wasn't even that!" (Sorry MBG)

Spy Kids 3D focuses (as much as one can focus with a red/green anaglyph style 3D movie) mostly on Chuni, who has inexplicably abandoned his OSS family and spy life and is instead a self-employed PI at age 10 or so. Uh huh. OK. Well, so he goes to rescue his (always more capable) sister from a devious video game that traps kids' minds so thatŠuhŠwait, I think it was the Toymaker (Sylvester "Slumming" Stallone) can begin the roots movement of his world domination plot. Seriously. Anyway, I don't expect mind-bending plot when I see a movie like this, but it's the execution more than the idea. It's like Tron gone horribly, horribly wrong.

The script is simply awful. The story is less cohesive (or engaging or amusing) than the queue preshow of a theme park ride. Some of the game punks that Chuni meets in the game (called Game Over in a poor marketing move) are giving abysmal line readings. I don't know if it's a smaller acting pool in Austin or if it's just Phantom Menace Syndrome (bad script + no actual setting = wooden delivery) but icch! The dialogue is insulting, worse than a backyard play. The Tron rip-offs are plentiful and painful. Take everything you (or I) hated about Phantom Menace, throw in an overexcited score, and then have the illegitimate child of The Mummy Returns and Space Jam do the computer work.

I was too bored to be properly angry, and too disgusted to be properly lulled to sleep. Even the room full of kids I was with wanted nothing to do with it. Free posters littered the floor after the show was over.

Small favors:

1. The time spent in the painful old school 3D glasses is not the whole time. (Hello! Polarized glasses, anyone? Wave of the recent past!)

2. All the actors from the first two movies show up at the end to generate applause (they practically have a laugh track at this point) but they serve no useful purpose.

While it is always great to see Austin (and Schlitterbahn!) on the big screen, not even that was enough to lower my terror alert level to boiling. Ugh. Painful.

Robert Rodriguez, indie paragon and inspiration to those struggling filmmakers (especially Tex-Mex ones) willing to phlebotomize themselves into finished productions, has done much morethan make a worthless sequel to two fun, love-your-inner-child adventure movies. He has betrayed all of those who hope for a budget like his, who work for the recognition and freedom he now enjoys. He spoke to the child within us all, and now he has slapped that child in the face. He hadn't sold his soul remaking El Mariachi into Desperado, or even making Spy Kids 2; but now he has. What happened to the craft, Robert? Back when Sphere's budget would have bought 8,571 El Mariachi's with change to spare, his was a voice that said "all that matters is the story" and he delivered. Now he is worse than the film whores he envied from his drafting table at the Daily Texan, and is no longer the Rebel Without a Crew (check the SK 3D: GO credits) that he wrote as. Shame on you, Robert. You lost your heart, your hand, and your eye, and now you will have to work twice as hard.

I will still see Once Upon A Time in Mexico (how could I not?) but no longer will I assume he is a safe bet.

-- ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ These reviews (c) 2003 Karina Montgomery. Please feel free to forward but credit the reviewer in the text. Thanks. You can check out previous reviews at: http://www.cinerina.com and http://ofcs.rottentomatoes.com - the Online Film Critics Society http://www.hsbr.net/reviews/karina/listing.hsbr - Hollywood Stock Exchange Brokerage Resource

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