SPY KIDS 2: THE ISLAND OF LOST DREAMS (2002) *1/2

Reviewed 8/8/02

SPY KIDS 2 is one of those movies that feels like the filmmaker got all of his friends together just as an excuse to spend time with them and which has the added benefit of producing wads of cash for said filmmaker and said friends.  That might be a good deal for Robert Rodriguez, but it sure isn’t for his audience.

The plot, which hardly matters, is about the spy kids from the first movie, siblings Carmen (Alexa Vega) and Juni (Daryl Sabara) Cortez, trying to keep some technological doohickey that could devastate the world out of the wrong hands.  Those hands belong to Donnagan Giggles (Mike Judge of “Beavis and Butthead” and “King of the Hill” fame), who has finagled his way to the head of the OSS, the spy agency that employs the Cortezes.  Carmen and Juni’s quest takes them to a JURASSIC PARK-inspired island where mad scientist Romero (Steve Buscemi) has genetically engineered giant monsters – literal spider monkeys (though they act more like apes), pigs that can fly, and slizards (body of a lizard, head and neck of a snake).  The Cortez children are followed by malevolent rival spy kids, Gary (Matthew O’Leary) and Gerti (Emily Osment) Giggles.  Also in pursuit are Carmen and Juni’s parents (Antonio Banderas and Carla Gugino) and their pesky grandparents (Ricardo Montalban and Holland Taylor).  Danny Trejo, Cheech Marin, Alan Cumming, and Tony Shalhoub all reappear from the first film in meaningless cameos.

Since writer-director Rodriguez has virtually no interest in the plot, then the focus must be on making fun jokes and exciting set pieces, right?  One would think so were the movie not about as funny as getting a tetanus shot.  The action, which mostly consists of lots and lots of fake-looking CGI whizzing about, might induce seizures in Japanese children when on tv, but it has all the excitement of waiting on the washer to finish your laundry.  Rodriguez even tries to  pay tribute to Ray Harryhausen, which would be admirable were it not the case that Harryhausen’s stop-motion skeletons are ten times as spectacular as Rodriguez’s computer-animated ones.  On a more positive note, Buscemi and Montalban add humor by their very presence, but it’s because of their past screen personas, not what they are doing here.  Only Emily Osment, Joel Haley’s sister, legitimately steals the show, with the perky petulance of a tiny Rosalind Russell.