Spy Kids (Connor Esterson and Everly Carganilla) live in a beautiful glass house and are unaware of how they are helping a game developer (Billy Magnussen) seize a dangerous computer virus. But, having made a mistake, the smart and savvy kids are not going to leave the villain in the power of technology - they become spies to save the world together with their parents (Zachary Levi and Gina Rodriguez). To do this, the family will have to fight the developer in the virtual world.
Everly Carganilla as Patty in a still from “Spy Kids: Armageddon”
The Spy Kids franchise has been waiting for its moment to be updated, but in ten years, it seems to have dissolved into the public sphere - time has judged the series mercilessly. Robert Rodriguez, however, decided to spare no one - the director has not been reaching for the stars for a long time, not trying to catch up with his former glory, but continues desperate vivisections on film material. At the same time, he makes films for children with such childish enthusiasm, as if behind the scenes is not a 55-year-old director, but that same boy who went for the transmooker. If Rodriguez allowed himself to be infantile, he often compensated for it with some cinephilic wildness smeared on celluloid: “The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl” always had “Planet Terror”, “Shorts” - “Machete”, and the inglorious fourth “Spy Kids” - a sequel blow by the same “Machete” and “Sin City”. Now Rodriguez holds no promise - his leap into the world of children’s dreams looks firm and final, and Troublemaker Studios has long turned from a forge of film classics into a dreary garage of a technician-laboratory assistant.
Zachary Levi as Terrence in a still from “Spy Kids: Armageddon”
You involuntarily meet the reboot of a famous franchise with coldness: the spy passions of past films have subsided, good actors have been replaced by ordinary ones (the fourth part already faced this, which, in fairness, they preferred to forget), and the director’s motivation itself has changed significantly: if in the trilogy, say, Rodriguez was fooling around, but with taste and knowledge of the matter, then in “Armageddon” he is already preparing a product, and randomly generated. “A neural network could have created such a film” and other verbal barbs are just begging to be said. You can talk about the actors in more detail: spy kids Connor Esterson and Everly Carganilla are far from Daryl Sabara and Alexa PenaVega, but, let’s be honest, stainless sympathy is easy to explain by habit and uncontrollable nostalgia. Not much is required of children in the frame: to knock out computer NPCs, to look like cool parents and to flash their baby teeth. The case is more difficult with the older ones: Zachary Levi and Gina Rodriguez do not even come close to filling the frame with the energy that Antonio Banderas and Carla Gugino gave, but okay: the main thing is that Levi in the frame looks like Ben Affleck - the hero, by the way, of Rodriguez’s previous (and very recent) failure called “Hypnotic”.
Gina Rodriguez as Nora in a still from “Spy Kids: Armageddon”
In general, “Armageddon” can give little: a more insightful drawing of villainous skeletons, an actual restructuring of family roles (girls here are the strongest and most decisive, but Rodriguez, however, has been telling this story since the 90s) and a rather flimsy mix of two plots - the first and third films. First, the familiar spy mess and the exposure of parental work, and then the battle with the villain in digital landscapes (since the release of the triquel, they have not become better, it seems). The director is a hooligan, even in the format of a slick release for streaming, he leaves his criminal traces; they unmistakably lead to the person who is responsible for other acts of fraud - for example, when he forced you to smell fragrant cards in the cinema and called it “4D format”. And “Armageddon” in this sense is just another creative relapse.