Flak Magazine: Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over, 07-30-03

Film is the most collaborative artform, and this gives it a peculiar strength: Even if not every participant (director, writer, producer, cinematographer, editor, production design, visual effects supervisor, composer, to name a few) is at the same level artistically, the interplay of so many minds will, like any cross-breeding, make the final product hearty.

So then is the combination of those tasks within the same person — a writer-director, a producer-director, a cinematographer-director — the equivalent of inbreeding? To be sure, combining roles removes challenges, like the need to fine-tune ideas so they can be clearly communicated, or the firm push of informed feedback. Some would argue that those deficits are countered by the strength of a unified vision, and that has often proved the case when the director takes on, say, two roles. But Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over director Robert Rodriguez takes on all eight mentioned in the previous paragraph, and the movie is not much of an endorsement of this ostentatious approach.

It's true that Rodriguez has always taken on multiple creative roles in his films — it's part of his charm, not to mention his famous cost savings — and that he has made good movies, but with the exception of his feature debut El Mariachi, he's always worked with strong collaborators (such as writers Quentin Tarantino and Kevin Williamson, producer Lawrence Bender or cinematographer Guillermo Navarro). Not so with the Spy Kids films, particularly the latter two, which have been such microbrew affairs that Rodriguez calls them "home movies." When you're your own writer and cinematographer and producer, and when the only other producer on your films is your wife, and when you're enraptured with the speed and ease of digital photography (which Rodriguez adopted in Spy Kids 2), this may ultimately be too much freedom for a popular filmmaker. The modest decline of the Spy Kids franchise suggests his unfettered approach has made him cavalier enough to be content with first drafts, which is precisely what Spy Kids 3-D feels like.

Spy Kids is Rodriguez's one-film-a-year kids' fantasy franchise about Juni and Carmen Cortez (Daryl Sabara and Alexa Vega) finding out their parents are agents of an elite intelligence agency and then becoming part of the family business. The movies have been high-fun goofs — low on coherence but full of spirit, not to mention endearing, unpatronizing paeans to family. And this is true of Spy Kids 3-D, but it's the least of the series and is definitely a trip down the rabbit hole. When the imprisoned-in-cyberspace madman Toymaker (Sylvester Stallone in a quadruple role) traps Carmen in a beta version of the hot new virtual-reality game he's going to use to ensnare the world's youth, it's up to the retired Juni (who has quit the agency over a tiff) to be brought in for one last case so he can (a) rescue his sister and (b) disable the game without (c) freeing the Toymaker.

The mechanics of any of the above are never explained, so there's no intrigue whatsoever to the proceedings — it's all about Juni stumbling around in the 3-D animated world Rodriguez has created, which is as lunatic and slipshod as you might expect: frogs on pogo sticks, gladiator robots on the moon, lava surfing, a direct steal of The Phantom Menace's podrace …. As befits a video game but hampers a movie, these escapades are all ends unto themselves, with no relationship to the story they're supposedly advancing. But that's true of so many recent blockbusters that it seems churlish to bust Rodriguez's chops for it. Plus, they make for pretty good 3-D; watching anaglyph 3-D like this is always a your-mileage-may-vary enterprise, and I saw it at a drive-in, so all I'll say is that I saw a lot of depth into the screen, as if it were a window, but nothing that really leapt out in front of that window. (My three companions each reported success in seeing images nearer than the screen, but what worked for one didn't work for the other — one saw a butterfly at close range; another had metallic goop all up in her face.)

But more disappointing than the herky-jerky plot is how Rodriguez has scuttled the franchise's best asset: the cast. It's one thing to squander appearances by kicky character actors like series regulars Tony Shalhoub and Danny Trejo. It's more dispiriting to see the kids' father, the top-billed Antonio Banderas — whose funniest English-language turns have been under Rodriguez's direction — get less than five minutes' screen time, though becase he's not a spy kid his neglect may be excusable. It's downright tragic, however, for Alexa Vega to be missing from more than half the film. Her co-star Daryl Sabara is able enough in the Juni role, but he doesn't communicate a lot of range; Vega, however, is a real star find, and the movie misses her spiky, real-kid charm. Of all the decisions that hurt the movie, making it primarily Juni's quest and populating that journey with a bunch of pre-adolescent no-names — particularly considering the obvious comic potential of Juni and Carmen leading their video-game-clueless parents through a VR world — is the most inexplicable. It would be one thing if the movie was really sharp or observant about how kids relate to video games, but all attempts at jokes are either toothless or restricted to name-dropping.

That said, the mild pleasures of the adventure are deepened by the two adults who warrant screen time. Juni brings Ricardo Montalban's grandfather character into the game, giving the actor proper berth after he was wasted in Spy Kids 2. As in real life, Montalban's grandfather character is a wheelchair user, but in the game world, he becomes ambulatory again, and there's some real grace to the scenes like the one where, in a suit of computer-generated armor, he goes chasing after a butterfly. That doesn't prepare you, however, for the scene where he talks about how life has been since he lost the use of his legs and his feelings toward the man responsible, which has far more gravitas than a scene conducted inside the head of a giant robot ape should. The themes at play here, as well as the apex of Rodriguez's pro-family proselytization — that we're all family — come off as entirely unforced, and that Rodriguez can make them so effortlessly reveals what may be his truest genius; it certainly reveals his sincerity.

And then there's Stallone as the Toymaker, as winning a comedic performance as he's ever given. The Spy Kids villains have all reflected Rodriguez in some way, but the Toymaker is a new adventure in semi-deliberate self-criticism. Stallone has only one scene with another actor, spending the rest of the time yelling into a videophone or in a computer-generated room acting opposite three other incarnations of himself (though nothing so traditional as id/ego/superego). Rodriguez presents the character's befuddlement as a tragic plight, seemingly unaware of its echoes to his own situation: a mild megalomaniac who needs counsel about how to handle the world he's created, but who's only willing to seek out answers from himself. The Spy Kids movies always end with the assimilation of the misfit genius into the extended Cortez family, and it's obvious why this is so appealing to a romantic paterfamilias like Rodriguez (whose three kids are named Rocket, Racer and Rebel).

It's a nice idea, and it's hard to see why Rodriguez won't take it to heart. The history of Hollywood movies is indisputably filled with personal filmmaking by directors who were fortified and challenged by their collaborators, and it's somewhere between foolish and arrogant of Rodriguez to think that he's got a leg up on his peers by doing it all himself. The real test of a director is not his ability to operate a camera (I'm talking to you, Peter Andrews); it's his ability to conduct the orchestra of talent around him, to get a roomful of artists working together. The kid with all the gadgets playing alone in his room — that's not family, that's the Toymaker.

— Sean Weitner (sean@flakmag.com)