It’s been 20 years since Robert Rodriguez performed a one-of-a-kind feat that was unique in large part because it wouldn’t occur to anyone else to try: He capped two different trilogies in the span of about two months, chasing his kid-franchise capper Spy Kids 3: Game Over (just under the wire for his stars’ impending teenage growth spurts) with the decidedly adult Once Upon a Time in Mexico. Finally, the prolific writer/director/producer/editor/cinematographer/composer could rest – meaning, in this case, wait less than two years before unleashing another discount-Spielberg double feature consisting of a family film and a more violent, grown-up offering. But 2005 was the last time we got a Rodriguez single-year double feature until now, as he follows up his little-seen sci-fi noir Hypnotic with the reboot Spy Kids: Armageddon (a previous one-off reboot/part four was released in 2011).
It’s tempting to say that Spy Kids: Armageddon is to Rodriguez’s kid-targeted movies as Hypnotic is to his grown-up stuff: A modest, entertaining, halfway-return to not-quite-form; something silly that will benefit from low expectations. And that’s largely true. It is most of those things. But while Hypnotic derived some novelty from what it didn’t much resemble in Rodriguez’s filmography – a 1940s B-movie noir in color, featuring a contemporary movie star with a complicated public image – this Armageddon has clearly been brought about by Spy Kids past. We once again meet a pair of boy-girl siblings: Tony (Connor Esterson) and Patty Tango-Torrez (Everly Carganilla), whose parents Nora (Gina Rodriguez) and Terrence (Zachary Levi) secretly make their living as ill-defined spies. (Rodriguez has never aimed for junior-level le Carré, and at least Armageddon steps back from the maddeningly abstract ideas about espionage put forth by its predecessor, All the Time in the World.) Once again, the kids have to step up when their parents are incapacitated by a world-threatening supervillain.
Beyond this durable premise, Armageddon includes a mom-and-dad fairytale-mission flashback, like in the first Spy Kids; fighting skeletons, like in Spy Kids 2: Island of Lost Dreams; and scenes that take place inside a videogame landscape, like in Spy Kids 3 (and, metaphorically, like most of Rodriguez’s movies from the past two decades). These seem like conscious nods to the original trilogy, and most of them have their own little twists on the formula. What the movie fails to pick up is the finer points of its predecessors’ style and, especially, their eye for casting. Not just in the literal absence of the original kids (and the woeful substitution of Zachary Levi for Antonio Banderas), which is to be expected, but in the spirit of packing the cast with delightful supporting players like Danny Trejo, Steve Buscemi, Alan Cumming and Bill Paxton, who all enliven the original trilogy. (Even Sylvester Stallone gave it his best shot in the third one.) That’s not a knock on Billy Magnussen, who plays a game developer who wrests control of the world’s technology – a funny, parent-friendly echo of Terrence’s desire to control his son’s obsessive tech use. He just doesn’t have anyone to play off of; the whole movie feels weirdly underpopulated, with some neat-looking CG figures getting more screentime than the flesh-and-blood actors who typically inhabit Rodriguez’s Austin-shot virtual worlds.
The visuals effects on his green-screen-heavy productions are getting better all the time, especially given that they’re intended to be fanciful and kid-friendly, not photorealistic. Yet much of Armageddon looks flat and meager, which is not unusual for a Netflix production, but is a little surprising given the participation of long-standing production companies like Skydance and Spyglass. As with Rodriguez’s previous Netflix kid movie, We Can Be Heroes, the action scenes are more workmanlike than gleeful. Rodriguez made surprising sense as a children’s-movie director because he himself took obvious, kid-in-a-fireworks-factory joy in staging shoot-outs, chases and stand-offs. He can still bring the heat when necessary, as seen in his Alita for-hire gig; Armageddon feels pretty soft-pedaled by comparison.
To his credit, Rodriguez does seem interested in evolving, perhaps in consultation of his multiple children who can now co-write a screenplay (Racer Max), work on a musical score (Rebel), or sing the movie’s theme song (Rhiannon). While an early Spy Kids adventure included a lesson about the kids over-relying on their gadgets rather than their wits, this one takes a view of technology befitting the 20-year time jump: It’s just as dangerous to appoint yourself the arbiter of how tech is used, whether it’s forcing the world to play your videogames or insisting that those videogames rot your kid’s brain. Spy Kids: Armageddon also extols the virtues of honesty, whether through parents or children, and nonviolent solutions to problems. After all these years, a Spy Kids adventure can still be counted on for warmth: The lessons are sweet, the kid actors are cute, and the kid audience will probably enjoy it accordingly. Whether it sticks in their memory for 20 years or even a few months, though, is another question entirely.
Director: Robert Rodriguez
Writer: Robert Rodriguez, Racer Max
Starring: Everly Carganilla, Connor Esterson, Gina Rodriguez, Zachary Levi, Billy Magnussen
Release Date: September 22, 2023
Jesse Hassenger is associate movies editor at Paste. He also writes about movies and other pop-culture stuff for a bunch of outlets including Polygon, Inside Hook, Vulture, and SportsAlcohol.com, where he also has a podcast. Following @rockmarooned on Twitter is a great way to find out about what he’s watching or listening to, and which terrifying flavor of Mountain Dew he has most recently consumed.