Spy Kids: Armageddon review: Same formula, different family, still fun

Spy Kids is one of those ideas someone was bound to come up with eventually, a combination of two words that, in the right hands, reads like a license to print money. It’s no wonder, then, that franchise creator Robert Rodriguez produced four mid-budget Spy Kids features over the course of a decade, and they collectively earned more than half a billion dollars worldwide.

But there’s more to Spy Kids than just taking a couple of cute children and giving them gadgets to play with. These movies are at their best when they say something about family and how kids see the world. So, along comes Spy Kids: Armageddon, the first reboot in the franchise’s history, and the first Spy Kids movie in more than a decade, to attempt to do just that. The results are, perhaps unsurprisingly for a Netflix kids adventure, a bit mixed, but in the hands of Rodriguez and his son and co-writer Racer Max, this latest installment in the series is a very pleasant family adventure, provided you’re willing to meet the film on its terms.

If you’ve seen any of the original films, you know the basic setup here: Two kids are unknowingly the children of world-class secret agents, their parents are threatened, and they must learn spycraft and become “spy kids” to save the world as a family. This time around, the kids are Patty (Everly Carganilla) and Tony (Connor Esterson). Patty is a rule-follower extraordinaire, always concerned with fairness and goodness, while Tony is a classic rule-breaker, doing his best to skirt the rules to get what he wants, whether that’s winning at a video game or just earning extra privileges around the house. The kids’ parents, Terrence (Zachary Levi) and Nora (Gina Rodriguez) combat this by limiting screen and device time for both children, while wrestling with when and how to break the news to Patty and Tony that they’re actually superspies.

The secret is broken when an evil game developer called The King (Billy Magnussen) gets his hands on “The Armageddon Code,” a spy device so powerful it can break into any electronic system. With The King out to change the world by making everything into a game, and Nora and Terrence in the hands of The King’s evil video game minions, it’s up to Patty and Tony to learn how to become spies so they can save their family, and the world.

The adults in the room will, of course, figure out where a lot of this is going right away, and Rodriguez and Max structure their script to include lots of knowing winks at the more mature members of their audience. They’re playing by classic spy movie rules, they know it, and they’re more than happy to let viewers in on that. Still, even the winks and nods, helped along by Levi and Rodriguez’s performances as superspy parents, can get a little trying if you’ve run the gauntlet of action movies for kids over the years. At least the film is making an effort to do something a little bit more sophisticated.

This is a kids’ movie, first and foremost, which means many of the jokes and set pieces are designed so they won’t go over the heads of younger viewers. That doesn’t make the film bad, but the trick to Armageddon working as a family-pleasing feature lies not in the plotting or the jokes, but in the themes Rodriguez and Max are trying to explore. Every 21st-century kid can relate to having their tablets and game consoles taken away, just like every 21st-century parent can relate to the anxieties of trying to limit their kids’ exposure to an increasingly open and strange world. Max and Rodriguez latch onto these everyday concerns, then take them one step further, imagining a world in which the devices that parents and children fight over aren’t just distractions, but active antagonists so sophisticated that the people who use them most, i.e. the kids, might be the only ones capable of saving the world from their influence.

The film’s villain is a man out to gamify everything, convinced that only he can master the world’s problems, who’s also sure that visual technology and just about everything else peaked in the 2000s (a fun nod to the film’s slightly throwback CGI designs). The heroes, two young people who want to bring all the things they love together, are just trying to find a way for their entertainment and their family dynamic to co-exist. It’s not hard to see the message the movie’s trying to send, and thanks to winning performances from Carganilla, Esterson, and most importantly Magnussen (who’s having a ball), that message mostly gets across.

Throw in a few fun set pieces, some dynamic creature designs, and a breezy narrative that zips by before your eyes, and Spy Kids: Armageddon comes away as a film that mostly works. It’s not going to reinvent the kids’ movie wheel by any means, but if you’re willing to engage with the film on its level, you’ll find a lot of fun to be had.

Spy Kids: Armageddon streams on Netflix beginning September 22