Plot Details: This opinion reveals minor details about the movie's plot.

A good family film (which is different from a children's film in that it's suitable, ideally, for every age group) is about as hard to find as a quality piece of music on MTV, so when a really good one comes along, like Robert Rodriguez's Spy Kids, one is tempted to overstate its positive qualities. It's not a masterpiece in the vein of Disney's Toy Story 2, but it's safe to say it's as good as we've seen from the genre since that computer-animated film came out in 1999.

The story, a nonsensical mishmash of kid's fantasy adventure and old Republic serials via Steven Spielberg, fashioned with Rodriguez's dazzling skill as a visual technician and his peerless ability to keep things moving and grooving, is about a brother and sister (Alexa Vega and Daryl Sabara) on a mission to rescue their parents (Antonio Banderas and Carla Gugino), retired spies who have been kidnapped by the nefarious Fegan Floop (Alan Cumming) and his minion Minion (Tony Shalhoub). Floop wishes to extract from the couple vital information regarding a government-created artificial brain, a piece of technology he will use to equip his army of android children, which in turn he will use to conquer the world.

Spy Kids has been co-produced, written, directed, and edited by Rodriguez, noted for his 1993 ultra-low-budget actioner El Mariachi and its 1995 sequel, Desperado. Becoming acquainted in the early nineteen-nineties with Quentin Tarantino (who had a small role in Desperado), the two collaborated with Allison Anders and Alexandre Rockwell on Four Rooms, which was unanimously hailed as a piece of garbage by critics and audiences alike. Q.T. and R.R. wrote and directed, respectively, the ultra-violent 1996 vampire schlockfest From Dusk Till Dawn - a movie I seem to be the only person to have actually enjoyed - and prior to Spy Kids, the Texas-born helmer somewhat energetically directed a lame Kevin Williamson script called The Faculty. What's most surprising about his work on Spy Kids is that he wrote the script himself - of the above titles, the only one he didn't write was From Dusk Till Dawn, an observation that does not yield much evidence that the man can put together a script with comedy or drama suitable for children (or, come to think of it, grown-ups). But he is successful.

Children are likely to have a ball at this movie, will respond to its breathless energy, and parents will be glad to know that most of the humor avoids the gutter and the toilet, relying greatly on flawlessly executed sight gags, word play, and simple absurdity. Also, Rodriguez respectfully and genuinely pays tribute to the positive lessons about family unity and individual strength that propel the story, but (until the last shot, with all the protagonists delivering the story's moral directly into the camera) doesn't beat us about the head and neck with Message. I can't be sure whether grown-ups and older teenagers will get fired up by Spy Kids as something to enjoy for themselves, but I doubt they'll be bored, and anyone can appreciate a sincere, joyful, well-constructed piece of action cinema like this one.

The sets are the hokey, brightly colored plastic-and-plaster kind ubiquitous in Spielberg's Hook and episodes of the original Batman and Star Trek television series - but this only adds to the unreality of the whole thing. The visual scheme of Spy Kids is of an amusement park and funhouse gone mad. The movie is packed, but not clogged, with high-tech gadgetry and expensive-looking CGI effects (it looks like a two hundred million dollar-budgeted clunker, but it apparently only cost thirty-five million - thus, Rodriguez also shares Spielberg's thriftiness), and if it weren't for the story's dogged emphasis on character and human interaction, Spy Kids would be nothing but pure, uncut eye candy. But clocking in at eighty-eight minutes, Rodriguez pulls off the impressive accomplishment of making an adventure film that's both fast-paced (when a joke falls flat, the movie is so weightless that you hardly notice) and human-oriented, rather than top-heavy and F/X-oriented.

Recommended: Yes