'Spy Kids: Armageddon' Review: Robert Rodriguez Returns to His Best Franchise for Another Incredibly Fun Time at the Movies
Thanks to an incredible sense of visual skill and a terrific cast, Spy Kids: Armageddon revives one of the best family franchises in modern film history.
This piece was written during the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike. Without the labor of the actors currently on strike, the movie being covered here wouldn’t exist.
Whether you asked for it or not, Spy Kids is back, and the five-year-old in me couldn’t wait to tune in and watch the latest installment, Spy Kids: Armageddon, on Netflix this week. The connection I hold with the Spy Kids franchise is extremely close, as Spy Kids 3D: Game Over was the first film I remember obsessively watching repeatedly as a form of pure escapism. Sure, the effects look chintzy as hell, and the red/cyan 3D will give you one hell of a headache, but there’s something about these movies that feel so grandiose that you can’t help but love every single second you spend with these characters.
Director Robert Rodriguez knew exactly how to make his franchise ultra-memorable and make the youngest audience members feel seen, whether through Juni (Daryl Sabara) or Carmen Cortez (Alexa PenaVega). Both of them embodied familiar traits associated with how kids saw themselves, and when they wore their spy suits on screen for the first time and saved the world, they instantly became childhood icons. For me, at least, Spy Kids 3D was an out-of-body experience, and I still have fond memories of revisiting the film from time to time as one of the finest pieces of blockbuster cinema ever made, with bad visual effects and all. I wouldn’t change it for the world.
Rodriguez wants to revive the franchise for a new generation of children with Spy Kids: Armageddon. While it is unfortunate that no one from the original cast returned, not even for a cameo, the fifth installment still manages to be boatloads of fun. It amalgamates everything Rodriguez loves about filmmaking, wrapping a series of high-octane action sequences inside environments that feel grand and urgent for its two child protagonists, Tony (Connor Esterson) and Patty (Everly Carganilla). After accidentally giving away The Armageddon Code by downloading a highly anticipated video game to Rey “The King” Kingston (Billy Magnussen), the two learn that their parents (Gina Rodriguez & Zachary Levi) are OSS spies, and their lives are now turned upside-down, for better or worse.
The King plans to use the Armageddon Code to unleash his game on all electronic devices to force society into playing it to unlock their cars, cellphones, household systems, you name it. The King wants to build a better world, but all signs indicate a total cataclysm. It’s now up to Tony and Patty to save the world, as The King has kidnapped their parents.
This movie blends everything audiences loved about Spy Kids, Spy Kids 2: The Island of Lost Dreams, and Spy Kids 3D: Game Over while ignoring Spy Kids 4D: All the Time in the World ever happened (let it be known that this critic has a soft spot for it). You’ve got the conceit from the original film, alongside action sequences and callbacks that are very much influenced by parts two and three, although with much more sophisticated special effects. The game is a much better-realized version of what Rodriguez believed “Game Over” could’ve been.
The characters have lives inside the game (that goes to .5 before it reaches 0, a reference to the best scene from Spy Kids 3D) and have to defeat an evil “Toymaker” who plans to turn society into mindless consumers, trapping them in an endless cycle of having to play the game for basic human needs. Sounds familiar? Some will accuse Rodriguez (and his son, Racer Max, who co-wrote the script) of intellectual laziness. On the other hand, there’s nothing better to bring back Spy Kids than to re-tread what worked in the original installments for a new audience, especially when it’ll quasi-force them to visit the older movies either in preparation for the newest one or after discovering Armageddon.
Rodriguez is known for a cheap and efficient visual style, doing everything himself, from directing, composing, editing, and even sometimes acting as cinematographer. At times, it works wonders, though there are many occasions in which it doesn’t (his last film, Hypnotic, is a disaster). But it has always worked for the Spy Kids franchise, because the audience has to knowingly buy into the world’s artificiality by connecting to the characters who sell it. When Patty and Tony come out of the “Spy Suit Generator” door, with their badass suit and spy glasses, all in slow-motion, no child watching this will think it’s lame. Their eyes will widen in awe, thinking it could very well be them, going on large-scale missions to single-handedly save the world. How cool is that?
Rodriguez will consistently put the children into larger-than-life situations to widen a kid viewer’s eye even more, to fast-paced car (and boatplane) chases, scenes where the two have to use gadgets to get out of a closed environment, and its climax, entirely set in the video game, where Rodriguez blasts a guitar rendition of O Fortuna as Tony fights The King. No other filmmaker will ever think of something as epic to put in an action climax for mere children’s entertainment than Robert Rodriguez.
But Spy Kids isn’t mere children’s entertainment. At least not for a child. It’s an experience in which a filmmaker known for shooting the coolest things imaginable and making his actors look like the coolest people alive will show any kid watching that they can be as cool as them, if they believe they can. That alone is what makes the franchise so special, but it wouldn’t have worked if the acting wasn’t good. Thankfully, both Esterson and Carganilla are excellent as Tony and Patty, both embodying the spirit of Juni and Carmen, but making their characters stand apart from the iconic Spy Kids. Levi and Rodriguez also have great chemistry together, but it’s Magnussen who steals the show as The King, a role he was strangely born to play. It blends many of the styles he’s been known for throughout his career, which allows him to elevate the character into a villain that’s equally as fun as Sylvester Stallone’s The Toymaker or Mike Judge’s Donnagon Giggles.
Without a trace of sarcasm or irony, Spy Kids: Armageddon is one of the best pieces of family entertainment released this year, and Rodriguez’s best film in a [very] long time. It blends old-school cinema techniques with the latest & greatest visual effects work. It has tons of fun action sequences bolstered by a cast that seems to be game for the ultra-ridiculous, which is exactly what a Spy Kids movie should always achieve to be.