TEXAS, USA — Per movie law, once we see the good guys in the fifth and latest "Spy Kids" outing using a tool called the “armageddon code” to hack their way past obstacles, it's only a matter of time before it falls into the wrong hands. You know it. Franchise overseer Robert Rodriguez knows it. Zachary Levi and Gina Rodriguez sure aren’t doing much to disguise it as the latest pair of covert-operative parents who can only do so much to maintain a clean work-life balance before their mission eventually loops in their oblivious kids, Tony (Connor Esterson) and Patty (Everly Carganilla).
Such is the way things roll in these “Spy Kids” films, which have always functioned as the family-friendly B-side of genre wish fulfillment to Rodriguez’s bloodier, raunchier material. Will the San Antonio-born filmmaker ever lean all the way in and give us a team-up of Carmen Cortez and El Mariachi? It remains to be seen. But at the very least, another “Spy Kids” movie keeps the dream alive, even if “Spy Kids: Armageddon” shamelessly echoes prior installments from the tykes’ inexplicably quick transformation into death-defying operatives to the thinly veiled sentimentality and off-kilter aesthetics that suggests Rodriguez once had a videogame controller in his hand while dreaming up the elevator-pitch concept driving the whole thing.
That’s especially appropriate for “Armageddon,” it turns out. For the second time in three "Spy Kids" movies, the story explicitly tunes into children's allure with videogames and fashions an industry giant (Billy Magnussen) into the villain who threatens the creation of a world that can only be navigated if you’ve got prowess with a joystick. It’s a silly enough idea to buy into for 90 minutes (though nowhere near as gleefully loony as the 3-D-augmented antics of “Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over”), and does just enough to nicely reinforce the franchise’s core conceit by building the stakes around something that baffles parents but which comes as second nature to Tony and Patty.
This kind of thing seems to come as second nature for Rodriguez, too; it’s a bit uncanny how he delivered this gumball caper just a couple months after his violent and mind-bending thriller “Hypnotic” made approximately $47 in theaters. “Spy Kids” is destined for a bigger audience simply by virtue of its platform – it released on Netflix Friday – though at the same time it’s hard not to see “Armageddon” (written by Rodriguez and his son, Racer Max) as a parody of whatever imitators might have been born in the wake of his original early-2000s trilogy. Those surprisingly enjoyable movies boasted a better harmony between silly and sincere, as well as a Cortez family unit which you could believe knew each other for years before stepping in front of the cameras, and not mere moments.
“Spy Kids: Armageddon,” by comparison, is like a gadget trying to relocate the spark of a moviemaking era the franchise was always going to work best for: that awkward moment in the CGI transition when everything looked just a little off, and in such a way that matched unexpectedly well with the world of “Spy Kids,” which itself always felt gloriously just a little off from the start.
The dialogue here wavers between squeamish and competent, though that’s less a sign of a phoned-in script than one eager to get to the weirdness these movies tend to provide. There’s some of that, too, in the form of digital foes stylized as ancient Mayan warriors and Ray Harryhausen-esque henchskeletons who chase our young heroes through busy streets. But the movie’s structure and barely formed soul signals a franchise limited by its own potential where once it might’ve been a gateway to the even weirder, wackier stuff the DIY-happy Rodriguez was once inspired by.
"Spy Kids: Armageddon" is now streaming on Netflix. It's rated PG for sequences of action. Runtime: 1 hour, 48 minutes.
Starring Connor Esterson, Everly Carganilla, Zachary Levi, Gina Rodriguez
Directed by Robert Rodriguez, written by Rodriguez and Racer Max
2023
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