Spy Kids (Nostalgia Check)

For most of our childhoods, we do not approach films from a critical perspective. We watch them because they’re fun, colorful and they have sound. With this new feature, my goal will be to re-watch some of my favorite childhood films (and maybe television) and discover if they are actually good or if I was fooled by their mere existence. With the release of Spy Kids: All the Time in the World this weekend, I have decided to relive the first film in Robert Rodriguez’s Spy Kids saga. In fact, it was the trailer for All the Time in the World that more or less inspired this project. I remember the original Spy Kids being cartoonish, to be sure, but I didn’t remember it being quite as chaotic and over-the-top as this new film looks to be. (Or perhaps it was just the notion that Joel McHale is supposed to be the new Antonio Banderas. I love the man, but come on.) Seeing that the original was on Netflix Instant, I decided to tackle my childhood head-on. Surely Spy Kids would seem gritty and realistic compared to Rodriguez’s newfangled garbage.

Well, little did I know that Spy Kids was actually totally freaking insane. It is a complete mess in almost every way, and it doesn’t seem to have been plotted out so much as Rodriguez just made things up as he went. Many of the special effects haven’t aged well, and it’s not the glossiest thing in world, but darn it all if that isn’t what makes the movie so wonderfully charming. In many ways, Spy Kids feels like exactly the movie that would have been made if a bunch of elementary school students were given $35 million and a camera. It is a work of boundless imagination and absolutely no restraint.

Spy Kids takes place inside a world that was endlessly appealing to the 10-year-old me. It is chock full of nifty gadgets that seem like toys more than anything else, along with jetpacks, submarines, and a small bag that instantly turns into a McDonald’s value meal with little more than the push of a button. Being a young child watching all this, I likely had one thought throughout: I want to go to there. There is no real danger in Spy Kids that will frighten children, unless you’re talking about the Floogies, which at the time seemed to be the most terrifying creatures in film history. Instead, the spy business just looks like a jolly old time that allows you to do everything a child has ever wanted to do. Throughout the film, Rodriguez has a keen sense of what kids undoubtedly think is awesome.

What’s refreshing about Spy Kids is that it lacks the slickness that many kids’ films have today. In fact some sequences are, strictly speaking, horribly put together. Consider the jetpack chase, which ends with the children flying into a department store and taking refuge. They are followed by a group of Thumb-Thumbs (evil thumb-like monsters) who fly in through the door, hover for a second, and then fly right back out. These special effects were apparently added on top of what seems to be stock footage of a department store that features a few extras shopping yet not reacting to the freaking giant thumbs with jetpacks that flew into the store. The most ridiculous thing in the world is happening, yet these shoppers seem wholly unfazed.

Apparently, they come in all the time.

Yet without all this insanity, I doubt Spy Kids would be the ridiculously entertaining children’s film that it is. It hits all the right buttons Raiders of the Lost Ark hits so long as you are of a reasonably young age. It barrels ahead at full speed; introducing situation after situation and gadget after gadget until the film is finally over. It’s a quick ride as well. Spy Kids is only 88 minutes long with credits. It is the perfect children’s film in just about every way, as they’re not about to notice the not inconsiderable faults. It exists in its own coloring book universe.

The acting also seems perfectly in tune with Rodriguez’s ultimate vision. It’s true that at this point the leads Alexa Vega and Daryl Sabara weren’t acting so much as they were reacting, but it’s nice to see that the adult actors truly enjoyed the ride. Carla Gugino and Antonio Banderas make for a strangely convincing couple, and Tony Shalhoub gets a few wonderfully weird moments as Alexander Minion. But it’s Alan Cumming who completely steals the show as the possibly-evil Fegan Floop; a kids’ television host who has long had a fan in Sabara’s character. At any moment Cumming is so over-the-top that he might as well break into song, but there’s a wonderful humanity to his otherwise ridiculous character; he seems like a genuine guy who just wants to do the right thing. I guess that spoils whether or not he’s evil, but if you’re angry at that I don’t know what to tell you.

Rodriguez also adds some wonderful comic touches around the periphery that made me laugh out loud even all these years later. Little things like Cumming pressing a random button and the words “TOO LATE” coming up on the console screens really drive the point home as to what exactly Spy Kids is. It’s hardly the portrait of verisimilitude in kids’ movies that I remember it being, but at that point in my life I didn’t give two craps about that. I wanted to see two kids fighting off robot kids and gigantic thumb monsters with electric gumballs and instant cement that looks a great deal like silly string. Best of all, it does all of this without being the slightest bit offensive—the most dangerous moment in the film comes when Vega says “oh, shiitake mushrooms”—or vulgar. As Roger Ebert pointed out in his review, Spy Kids was released at a time when poop jokes in kids’ movies were the norm:

Movies like Spy Kids are so rare. Families are often reduced to attending scatological dumb-and-dumbest movies like See Spot Run—movies that teach vulgarity as a value. Spy Kids is an intelligent, upbeat, happy movie that is not about the comedy of embarrassment, that does not have anybody rolling around in dog poop, that would rather find out what can accomplish than what it can get away with.

I’m not sure if I’ll see Spy Kids: All the Time in the World this weekend, mostly because I’m not the target demographic. (Also: do I really want to deal with smell-o-vision?) From the previews alone, it doesn’t quite look like it has the same imaginative and innocent feel that made Spy Kids so terrific. If anything, it seems like just another in a line of shiny, crappy, non-animated kids’ movies that have been released of late. All I know right now is that the original Spy Kids—and the first sequel, from what I can remember—is every bit the treat I remember it being. When you’re in elementary school, this is the exact breed of escapism you need when you go to the movies. Vega and Sabara’s characters aren’t actual spies as much as they seem to be “playing spies” in the backyard, and for 88 minutes back in 2001 the ADD-addled youth of America were able to live vicariously through them.