Spy Kids: All the Time in the World in 4D

Back in my day, Spy Kids was an awesome movie about two quarreling siblings who didn’t think their parents were cool enough to be spies. And once they find their parents missing, they must work together to save their parents from the villainous host of a kid’s TV show. However, this time, the Spy Kids franchise has finally run its course. Like most sequels, this fourth Spy Kids excessively relies on the original series instead of creating its own unique characters and storyline.

Marissa Wilson (Jessica Alba) retires from her career as a spy in order to devote her full time and attention to her two stepchildren and her newborn daughter. Before retiring, she successfully apprehended criminals while toughing out her contractions. Even a year after retiring, her step-children, especially Rebecca (Rowan Blanchard) still have not accepted her as part of the family. Even amidst this domestic struggle, Marissa is assigned to catch the evil Time Keeper before he steals time all for himself.

Like its predecessors, Spy Kids: All the Time in the World emphasized the important message that families must unite in order to endure hardship. We thus have the workaholic, self-involved dad (Joel McHale) who is too busy to care about his family, the kids who dislike their stepmother for no good reason, and the tiresome sibling rivalry. The Time Keeper’s threat to eliminate all the time in the world appears to be the only panacea for reconciling this fractured family. 

I found the kids rather uninteresting because they exactly replicate the sharp sister-dweeb brother pair of the original movie. Like Carmen, Rebecca is competitive, smart, and often mean to her brother. Cecil (Mason Cook), like Juni, is often bullied by both his classmates and sister. While the writers may have wanted to recapture the original essence of Spy Kids by creating similar characters, this instead came off as unoriginal and bland.

Further exacerbating Spy Kid 4’s blandness, the film includes cute beings that fail to (ahem) control their bodily excretions in order to elicit quick laughs from young viewers. Although a children’s movie need not be 100% educational, it should not lower children’s IQs with cheap fart jokes. In efforts to mesh cuteness with “funny” gross humor, the film had a cute talking robot-dog (Ricky Gervais) excrete steel balls, pee oil slick, and cut the cheese. Whenever things look a little dreary, the youngest baby would dutifully let one rip. These efforts, while intended to maintain levity and engagement, came off as repulsive and irksome. 

The only redeeming quality about this movie is that it features a more realistic, lopsided dynamic between the parents than its original counterpart. This film (inadvertently) depicts a working mom who struggles to not let work interfere with her family life. Jessica Alba gives a surprisingly convincing performance as a mom who struggles to reconcile her demanding occupation with familial obligations. Although Alba has often given similar, uninteresting performances as the seductive beauty, this role as a tough, caring matriarch will allow her to appeal to younger families as opposed to the lustful male population. On the other hand, Wilbur marks an effective departure from Antonio Banderas’ intelligent, nearly-perfect father figure. As a vain, clueless host of a third-rate investigatory show, he continuously shuts his family out of his life, and places all of the domestic burden on Marissa. The family can only achieve unity when Wilbur takes up his part of the slack and when Marissa utilizes her skills as a spy to protect her family. This supermom-doofus dad combo emerges an interesting deviation from the composed Cortez parents.

But I won’t pretend that Spy Kids 4 gives a realistic, original portrayal of family life. It is sufficient as a family comedy popcorn movie, but that’s about it. The time has come for Robert Rodriguez to abandon the overdone Spy Kids franchise.