Cinema
Spy Kids 2: The Island of Lost Dreams (U, selected cinemas)
Fun with the half-pint spooks
Mark Steyn
Itook a couple of members of the target audience to see Spy Kids 2 and they had a ball. But I couldn't help noticing that what they most appreciated in the movie, at least to judge by the in-depth analysis afterwards, was 'the camel poop scene', It is, indeed, a fine camel poop scene, though simply reprinting the relevant section of the screenplay — 'Eceeugh! Camel poop!' — does not perhaps convey its entire flavour. It may well be the all-time great camel poop scene, though I will leave a final judgment to more specialised scholars. I can't recall a camel poop scene in The Desert Song, but it could certainly have used one.
Anyway, I mention this because none of the American critics did. So bear in mind that when you're reading a review hailing Robert Rodriguez's kinetic brilliance, his painterly use of colour, his technical wizardry and his digital photography, that he's also a guy who knows when to throw in a good camel poop joke. For those who missed the first movie, Spy Kids is about the adventures of two kid spies, enrolled in the junior wing of the US government's intelligence operations. Spy Kids 2 builds the franchise and suggests that the only constraint on its growth is likely to be the toll the years take on its two enjoyable kid stars, Alexa Vega (Carmen) and Daryl Sabara (Juni).
Rodriguez is the producer, director, writer, editor, production designer, director of photography, composer and re-recording mixer of Spy Kids 2, merely to list his formal credits. By this stage, my eyes were beginning to reel, so I may have missed a couple — key grip, caterer, etc. As my old friend Irving Caesar, producer, author, cocomposer and co-lyricist of My Dear Public, said to Oscar Hammerstein after reading the opening-night notices: 'Okay, so they didn't like it. But why pick on me?' With Rodriguez and Spy Kids, even if one does like it. one feels an odd urge to pick on him. It seems self-evidently ridiculous that one man could be equally talented as writer and production designer, director and composer.
Yet one reason the Spy Kids movies are such fun is that they're very clearly the product of a single creative imagination: the design matches the writing; the music is
in tune with the acting; and all the elements have a kind of sassy energy that usually gets drained away in traditional Hollywood 'collaboration'. There are a couple of small touches early on that sum up the Rodriguez style: a phalanx of protective Secret Service agents in government suits and dark glasses waltz in formation around the President's daughter at a formal dance; then, a posse of bad guys escapes by hanging off the undercarriage of their flying saucer attached to it only by their magnetic fezes, a very memorable image. In theory, a team effort could have hit upon the same consistency of tone in look, music, dialogue, plot; in practice, they rarely do.
As you may have gathered. Spy Kids 2 is the spy pastiche Goldmember couldn't be bothered to be. It has a Bond-style pretitles sequence, in which Carmen and Juni rescue the First Daughter from an amusement-park ride that goes badly awry. It exemplifies Rodriguez's zest for bursting the confines of the real world: Thus, the park impresario (Bill Paxton) proudly unveils his newest attractions — the Whipper Snapper, in which customers ride in cars at the end of long snappable whips; the Vomiter, which is self-explanatory; and the Juggler, a ferris wheel that literally juggles the cars from one spoke to the next.
Carmen and Juni save the White House moppet, but their thunder is stolen by rival (and snottier) spy kids. Gary and Gerti Giggles (Matthew O'Leary and Emily Osment). Here, the kid spy movie tracks the middle-aged original with loving detail: like his grown-up predecessors, Juni is now the unreliable maverick who's taken off the case, suspended, and forced to hand back his badge and gadgets. Fortunately, his big sister Carmen, like her grown-up equivalents, knows how to hack into the computer and get him his security clearance back. That way the half-pint spooks can get on with hunting down the MacGuffin — the Transmooger, a device on whose recovery the fate of the world depends. And so they set off for a lost island on which a mad scientist (Steve Buscemi) has been experimenting with very mixed results.
If that sounds like the usual preoccupations of pop-culture parody, what lifts it above is Rodriguez's ability to create a self
contained world all of its own restless, wacky, beautiful to look at and with a genuine emotional warmth. It's a very Hispanic milieu, from the Cortez kids' parents (Antonio Banderas and Carla Gugino) to the colours of the film, but it's incidentally Hispanic, as if it's no big deal that the future of the planet depends on one Latino-American family. It's also very well cast: in this film, Rodriguez introduces Ricardo Montalban (in a flying wheelchair) and Holland Taylor as Carmen and Juni's grandparents. Spy Kids was the sleeper hit of children's movies last year. I hope Spy Kids 2 does just as well, even if only because of the camel poop.
Previous page
