Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over (2003)

GAME OVER is the third of the increasingly poor SPY KIDS franchise from director Robert Rodriguez. As I like the director's adult fare I thought I might get a kick out of these too, but they turn out to be very juvenile outings with overacting from the unrestrained child actors and plotting overcome by sheer stupidity. The one consistent thing about the series is the awful quality of the special effects, where you see CGI at its very worse. This time around, most of the story is set in a video game virtual reality world, so at least the graphics have an excuse to be bad. Sylvester Stallone, who you feel sorry for, plays the new villain who the kids have to fight against, but it's all interminable action scenes and unfunny humour. Endless cameos from series regulars like Danny Trejo, George Clooney, Steve Buscemi, and Bill Paxton do nothing to offset the boredom induced by sitting through this nonsense.

Spy Kids 3D gave an in depth and alternative view of the proletariat role in western society. This social commentary dissected the roles that we as a modern and civilized global society view as innate, despite the lack of assessment of any possible predispositions that we may have for all stereotypes, whether they be accurate or simply founded upon the falsities that we believe to be true based on nothing but our upbringing and the generalized conceptions of those immediately surrounding us in our cultivated yet shallow socioeconomic ecosystem. Juni, most specifically, characterizes the easily impressionable tabula-rasa-esque youth of the millenial generation. His apparent attraction to a woman discovered to be a mere image of technology symbolizes the youth's dependency on modular communication. So basically he like pulls hoes.

Game Over. Game Over is the sub-heading to this third Spy Kids film, and boy does "Game Over" just about sum it up. This second sequel, in what has been, in all honesty, a laborious and solemn franchise of child-induced shenanigans and daft spectacle more often than not the wrong side of painful, is near-to unwatchable; a tumbling, spindly, visually ugly little piece rotten to sit through and annoying to think about. American director Robert Rodriguez has always been the king of a kind of crass; a filmmaker often making gleefully scuzzy B-movies, from his own scripts, which riff on either science fiction or crime - more often than not pulling them off. The Spy Kids films have always been where Rodriguez strikes out; his foundations built on guerrilla filmmaking, in El Mariarchi, gave way in equal tandem to both Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Assualt on Precinct 13 pastiches, in 1998's The Faculty as well as 1996's From Dusk till Dawn, respectively, which further still led much more recently onto postmodern homages of the Grindouse movement and classical Hollywood noir. Spy Kids, and its sequels, just seem to be the lame and unnecessary blot on your man's CV; a playground, a test area for the director to experiment with green screen backgrounds and to kick back with people of whom he has previously worked.The little kid from the previous two films, who was never that interesting, here drives this entry; he is Juni Cortez, played by Daryl Sabara, and the film's first mistake is to promote him from the good foil that he was to his sister, played by Alexa Vega, to chief protagonist. After a lot of old nonsense at the death of Spy Kids 2, which encompassed his dismissal from the secret agent society within which his entire family operated, Juni is working as a "gumshoe" for private child clients whilst doing his best to solve other such conundrums like removing people's cats from trees. He walks down lonesome streets and arranges to meet in old theme parks devoid of activity; he is as empty and as desolate as these places look. A film along these lines revolving around Juni as a P.I. might have been good fun; Rodriguez would go on to explore such things in an as additionally-a post-modern way, and with the sorts of green screen effects put to use here, in his following project, Sin City.Unfortunately, we get all of about five minutes of the "Juni the P.I." movie; the film spiralling down an unrestrained and positively puerile path more broadly representative of Sabara's character propelling himself into a video game to encounter temperamental youths and duel with them. The catalyst for all this nonsense is the mysterious kidnapping of his sister, Carmen, and her consequent disappearance into this virtual-reality; a situation painfully set up by Salma Hayek's exposition – a role you can literally see Hayek having second thoughts about as the film wears on and her role gets gradually more plentiful. This video game alternate reality Juni must enter is apart of a broader network of video gaming franchising that has the world's child population hooked. However, there is something sordid and underhanded beneath its surface; a wicked individual at its heart running the thing named The Toymaker, who is an old enemy of Juni's ex-employers and is played here by Sylvestor Stallone - Often, one incarnation of Stallone is enough in a film; here, and because we begrudgingly get four of him.Prior to going in, Juni is additionally swept up in the wave of popularity this video game has on everyone – but would someone of Juni's life experiences thus far really be into such a juvenile thing? Rodriguez painstakingly inserts this central tract about how the one thing you think is all conquering and glamorous is actually somewhat flawed; additionally, there is a persistent coming back to how important it is not to cheat at games you play with people. The politics are in the right place, but anyone either elder than nine years old or looking for something a little more out of the film, is not. What the mission consists of, is a bunch of one-on-one duels with other gamers: there is a sword fight; an automobile race; a boxing match involving gigantic robots – none of it interesting, most of it capable of unfolding in any order you like and anybody who has seen 1982's TRON and doesn't think of it while they watch it just isn't trying hard enough. The film's end credits are particularly revealing, in that the project's lone laugh is a natural instance which rears up during shooting; the technical aspects behind the project, as Rodriguez et al. use the green screen and the machinery to recreate the virtual-reality world, look quite interesting – proving that the theory and technicalities behind such technology is inherently more interesting than anything people create with it. As the film dies its death during its Time Bandits-inspired finale, one character stops amidst the chaos as asks: "Wait a minute, who won?" Well, we in the audience certainly didn't.

Or so we thought after this 3rd outing for the Spy Kids but now it seems that a new film is on the cards with the series being rebooted for a new audience.This film was fun and at it's time unique through it's use of 3D but was let down by a weak plot. The mass cameos at the end cannot save it and I think even the director knew that the franchise had come to a sticky halt.It is a prime example of a film series where the third part lets it down due to a lack of fresh ideas and the fact that there are so many characters to try and bring back.Stallone is the best thing about this film and if you see it then you'll know how tongue in cheek that remark was.