Film Review: "Spy Kids: Armageddon" (2023).

"Meet the next generation" with Spy Kids: Armageddon. This spy action comedy film directed by Robert Rodriguez, and written by Rodriguez and Racer Max. It is the fifth installment in the Spy Kids film series. Spy suits. Safe houses. Super-cool gadgets. When Patty and Tony discover their parents are secret agents, it's time to become kid spies-in-training to save their parents, beat the bad guys, and save the world.

In January 2021, a reboot of the Spy Kids franchise was revealed to be in development with Rodriguez returning as writer and director. The film would involve a plot that centers around a multicultural family. . In March 2022, Netflix acquired distribution rights, making it the second Spy Kids project produced for the platform. The title was revealed to be Spy Kids: Armageddon, which was the original name for the previous film installment, Spy Kids: All the Time in the World (2011), with Rodriguez and his son penning the installment. By mid June 2022, Gina Rodriguez, Zachary Levi, Billy Magnussen, D. J. Cotrona, Everly Carganilla, and Connor Esterson were cast. At the same time, principal photography commenced and wrapped in late August. Filming took place in Austin, Texas.

The film stars Rodriguez, Levi, Magnussen, Cotrona, Carganilla, and Esterson. This is a shoddy affair with anodyne first-timers Carganilla, and Esterson almost as annoying as Ricky Gervais's phoned-in voiceover of an animatronic terrier with a poop obsession in the previous installment.

With any luck, the pre-teen audience will have as big a lark as Rodriguez but this fifth film does seem cruder and ruder than the first four in the series. No matter how many crazy images you slap on the poster, there's no accounting for lazy workmanship. Can Rodriguez please make Sin City 3 now? The mind boggles before being lulled into a stupor of inanition by this latest instalment of Rodriguez's increasingly cheap-looking franchise. Rodriguez directs the movie with his trademark kineticism, but a flimsy and uninventive script means there's little investment in the characters or their actions. Rodriguez's family franchise about underage secret agents limps into its fifth installment with shiny CGI and frequent fart jokes to hold the attention spans of the underage and undemanding. Rodriguez's various family-geared movies - notably the Spy Kids series - have been annoying creative clunkers, the one area where doing things his way has seemed like an iffy way. An endless series of scatological jokes saps the charm out of nearly every scene, and there's little effort to create an interesting mystery at the movie's center. The rhythm is off, a predicament Rodriguez addresses with copious - nearly constant - excrement and evacuation humor, and sudden turns into wide-eyed sincerity. Feels more like straight-to-DVD filler than a chapter in one of the last decade's most entertaining and sophisticated family-film franchises. I was apparently dealt a faulty card and could not pull up any discernible aromas other than those of flop sweat and mild embarrassment.

Simon says Spy Kids: Armageddon receives:

Also, see my review for Hypnotic and Spy Kids: All the Time in the World.