The Unseen Movie Review

The Adventures of Shark Boy & Lava Girl

Yet another outing from the workaholic Robert Rodriguez, just a few months after his sprawlingly intriguing overdose of stylised violence that was Sin City, this sees the maverick auteur return to the world of kids’ films in which he had so much success with his Spy Kids franchise.

Taking the same basic premise as his other childrens’ action movies, the concept for this outing seems both obvious and logical. Where Spy Kids saw the childhood fantasy of kids being mini James Bonds, this latest outing gives them pint-sized superheroes following almost exactly the same format. It’s an almost insanely simple and obvious step – so perhaps it should come as no surprise that the original idea came from Rodriguez’s young son, who gains a “Story by” credit for his pains.

Just to add to the childhood wish-fulfilment premise, here the plot hinges on a boy, Max (Cayden Boyd), with a wild imagination, ridiculed for his insistence that his kid superhero friends, the eponymous Shark Boy and Lava Girl, are real. It’s a bit of a re-tread of the ground covered by the 1980s franchise The Neverending Story, only with better special effects and no giant flying snake/dog hybrids. Once again the ordinary kid has to help the extraordinary by going off to a weird world and battling the forces of evil.

In other words, it’s all fairly standard stuff, with the promise of good special effects, the lure of the “from the director of Spy Kids” strapline, and the gimmick, used by Rodriguez for the third film of that earlier franchise, of 3-D. But although a lot of kids’ films are, by the very nature of their target audience, rather unchallenging and lacking in originality – the same plots can be rotated every ten years or so thanks to the rapid turnaround of the potential customers – it’s rare for them to be quite this uninspired.

It’s a good, simple premise, but somehow manages to fail dismally. Whether this is thanks to the reliance on the child actor leads, none of whom are up to the job, or the almost painful garishness of the rather unimaginative special effects it is hard to say. But it is, shall we say, little surprise that this movie was dreamed up by someone yet to hit double figures.

Considering the whole point of the film is the power of the imagination, as Max has to use his daydreaming skills to help his superhero buddies battle an array of stock CGI villains, the lack of imagination on display is even more galling. In a standard children’s film such blandness would be expected and forgivable, but not when the whole point is to be inspirational and mindblowing.

When Rodriguez last turned out two films in one year, with Spy Kids 3-D and Once Upon a Time in Mexico back in 2003, both obviously suffered as a result of the pressures he had put himself under. This time he seems to have put all his effort into making Sin City something genuinely special and left nothing in reserve for this outing. It may be time for Mr Rodriguez to take stock, and realise that there’s a reason why people no longer make films as if on a factory production line. Here, the vision which served him so well in Sin City is utterly lacking.

posted by Nosemonkey @ 4:14 AM