Nowadays just about every actor with a child in their life, whether it’s their own or a niece, nephew, or grandchild, feel compelled to star in family-friendly fare so that their littler loved ones can actually see something they’ve starred in. You see it all the time and it applies to action stars, dirty comedians, or the serious dramatic thespian. Everyone wants to be able to share their work with the chitlins. Until Spy Kids, Robert Rodriguez had a really tough time with that. His films, typically heavy in violence with fair doses of obscenity or sexuality, wouldn’t be the best choices for an 8-year-old on a Saturday morning, even if it might instill them with an appreciation for guitars. This led Rodriguez to the fun, campy Spy Kids series, with Antonio Banderas and Carla Gugino as the parents to two typical kids (Alexa Vega, Daryl Sabara) thrust into family business. It’s a fun series of films that let audiences watch its two child stars grow up in front of the camera, but each comes with its own share of foibles. This marks the second time Lionsgate has released the Spy Kids trilogy on Blu-ray this year, but the first time they’ve been streamlined into one easy Blu-ray case.
In the first Spy Kids, the lives of Carmen (Vega) and Juni Cortez (Sabara) are turned upside down when they discover the bedtime stories about the two spies who fell in love and started a family are none other than their own mom and dad. The revelation comes on the tail of their parents going missing and the apparent plot by a well-known TV personality (Alan Cumming) to convert spies into deformed creatures on his show. If Carmen and Juni ever want to see their parents again (and with their normal faces) they’ll have to embrace the spy-tricks in their genes and launch a rescue of their own.
Spy Kids 2: The Island of Lost Dreams follows up where the original film left off, with Carmen and Juni now full-fledged members of the childhood spy division. As two of the leading members, they’ve developed a rivalry with another brother-sister duo, only to have their standing diminished by an embarrassing snafu. To get back on top, Carmen and Juni hijack the other team’s mission only to discover the disappearances surrounding the mysterious island might lead back to the very agency they work for and a dangerous but highly advanced technology.
Spy Kids 3: Game Over, the final film of the Cortez family saga, was also the first of the series to be filmed in 3D. Juni, who retired from the spy business after the events of the second film, gets pulled back in when he learns his sister has gone missing while on assignment within a virtual reality computer game run by a villain known as the Toymaker (Sylvester Stallone). To rescue Carmen, Juni must once again take up the mantle of being a spy, infiltrate the video game, and beat it. Along the way, Juni discovers this isn’t nearly as easy as he first thought, and must call upon the help of his grandfather (Ricardo Montalban) whose presence introduces a wrinkle into Toymaker’s plan.
The series as a whole tends towards silliness when all else fails, and as a franchise aimed the young ones, there’s nothing really wrong with that. However, there is a noticeable trend that anyone watching the series back-to-back will notice: Rodriguez uses an increasing amount of slapstick humor with each film. Whether or not you think this means he decided that kids appreciate pratfalls and over-the-top punches, that’s up to you, but the evidence of the film shows an increasing distance between the films and verbal comedy in favor of sight gags. But an increase in sight gags doesn’t necessarily mean films with simpler or dumbed down stories, because the truth is just the opposite. Each film becomes increasingly abstract in what they ask children to comprehend, and even though kids might understand video games, the idea of actually putting them inside of one and gauging their lives there against their lives in the real world is probably above what most kids will absorb. Yet it’s there, so it suggests that Rodriguez is at least thinking about the concept beyond just a really easy setup for a 3D effects film.
Vega and Sabara get better with each film, but for adults, most of the enjoyment comes out of the cameos tossed in to prop the younger stars up. Gugino and Banderas do well, but by the second and third film they’re nothing more but two-dimensional characters that worry, flop about comically, or deliver really cheesy lines of dialogue. Montalban on the other hand, has the most meaty adult role from the second film onward, and it only increases in the third, although even he is then overshadowed by a Sylvester Stallone who just goes all out and seems to be having the time of his life playing such a scatterbrained character.
Blu-ray Bonus Features
As stated earlier, this is the second time the Spy Kids Trilogy has been released on Blu-ray this year, and so, as you might expect, the extras on the two sets haven’t changed. At all. For a full break down of the extras, head on over to the previous review. The only difference between that set and this one is that all three discs are now in one case, everything else is the same, including the design of the discs themselves.
"Spy Kids Triple Feature" is on sale December 15, 2011 and is rated PG. Action, Adventure, Children & Family. Written and directed by Robert Rodriguez. Starring Alan Cumming , Alexa Vega, Antonio Banderas, Carla Gugino, Daryl Sabara, Ricardo Montalban, Steve Buscemi, Sylvester Stallone.
