"Spy Kids 2: Island of Lost Dreams"

Cooler gadgets! Mini-mutants! A mad scientist on a mysterious island! Robert Rodriguez follows up his 2001 smash with another comic fantasy that'll please adults as much as kids.

By Stephanie Zacharek

Aug 7, 2002 | Filmmakers who think they know what kids like, without taking into account the things they like themselves, always end up making movies that talk down to their intended audience. Thank God Robert Rodriguez isn't one of them.

Rodriguez is that rare filmmaker who doesn't draw a hard, fixed line between entertaining kids and grown-ups -- he knows that in order to understand what will delight kids, you have to know what will tickle adults as well. His 2001 "Spy Kids" was ostensibly made for children, but it had more stylishness (not to mention a better plot and cooler gadgetry) than any James Bond movie made in the past 10 years. Now, with "Spy Kids 2: Island of Lost Dreams," Rodriguez has given us a sequel that builds onto and expands on the original, as opposed to simply rehashing what worked before.

"Spy Kids 2" doesn't hang together quite as well as its predecessor did -- it feels a little broader and slightly more forced in places. But its moments of awe and wonder (two of the things we supposedly go to the movies for but are consistently denied) more than make up for that. Rodriguez is a pop filmmaker of the best sort: He takes the things that delighted him as a young moviegoer and freshens them for a new audience, as well as for those of us who remember them from the first time around.

In "Spy Kids 2," the well-respected kid-spies Carmen Cortez (Alexa Vega) and her younger brother Juni (Daryl Sabara) find themselves challenged by a pair of uppity blond rivals: Gary Giggles (Matt O'Leary) and his little wiseacre sister Gerti (Emily Osment). Their father, Donnagon (Mike Judge, creator of "Beavis and Butt-head" and "King of the Hill"), has somehow been named the head of the supersecret spy organization they all work for, a post that Carmen and Juni's dad, Gregorio (Antonio Banderas), had hoped to get.

Something about the appointment doesn't seem right, and when Carmen and Juni unfairly lose a plum assignment to Gary and Gerti, they engage in a bit of hacking so that they can investigate what's going on. Their adventure takes them to a mysterious island. When Gregorio and their mother, Ingrid (Carla Gugino), lose the ability to track the kids' whereabouts, they set out to rescue them -- with Ingrid's mom and dad (Holland Taylor and Ricardo Montalban) in tow.

The secret of Rodriguez's success with the "Spy Kids" movies is that he makes you care as much about the characters as he does about the special effects. Banderas is wonderfully funny and light in both pictures -- he reminds us how hilarious he could be as a deadpan dreamboat in the early movies he made with Pedro Almodóvar, like "Law of Desire" and "Matador," as well as in the later adventure caper "The Mask of Zorro." Gugino is lusciously appealing but still completely believable as a mom -- a suggestion that there's no reason for grown-ups to cease being sexy once they become parents.

The same goes, of course, for the actors who play her own parents: Taylor, who has been sensational on TV's "The Practice" as a good-looking judge who hasn't let her age or her professional status stand in the way of her sex drive, doesn't have a whole lot to do here, but she makes the most out of the lines she's got. And her husband is played by the still-gorgeous Montalban who, even in his early 80s (and also, incidentally, now using a wheelchair), glows with as much likability and sex appeal as ever. He plays a grandpa here, but he does so with such charm and savoir-faire that you think of him as ageless.

The charming Danny Trejo also makes a return appearance as the gadget-builder Machete, a guy who, with his rough-looking face and biker ponytail, looks like the last person you'd entrust your kids to, but who is actually among the tenderest souls in the movie's universe.

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