The Goods: Film Reviews
We Can Be Heroes, the Robert Rodriguez return to family entertainment, is not quite good, but it is far more competent and watchable than I feared, especially given the car crash that was the Spy Kids reboot.
Calling The Adevntures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl “ugly” is a grave understatement.
There were certainly worse ideas in 2011 than rebooting the Spy Kids franchise. It’s a film concept that’s easy to refresh: recruit a new batch of charming kid actors, update the gadgets for the new era, weave in some family values, and spin up a kooky spy-fi premise.
I did not watch Machete and think “that movie left a lot on the table.”
Spy Kids 1 delivered on multiple competing genre fronts: a family-bonding adventure, a kiddie spy-action thriller, a light satire, and a digital editing/CGI showcase. Overall, a precarious, well-executed balancing act.
Nathan Rabin’s legendary My Year of Flops feature on AV Club groups bad movies into three categories:
A movie I like slightly less each time I see it, and now I’m up to four times, I think.
Machete isn’t strictly a Spy Kids spinoff.
Alexandre Koberidze’s Georgian slice-of-life, pseudo-silent, slow film aesthetic meets magical realism and romantic comedy in What Do We See When We Look at the Sky?, and the result is magnificent.
Spy Kids is, if not quite a gold standard for family-focused action-comedies, certainly an excellent specimen.