- Also Known As/Subtitle:
- Unknown
- Year:
- 2001
- Country/ies:
- US
- Predominant Genre:
- Comedy
- Author(s)/Director(s):
- Robert Rodriguez
- Outstanding Performance(s):
- None.
- Premiss:
- The children of secret-agent parents must save them from danger.
- Theme(s):
- Alienation
- Compassion
- Courage
- Destiny
- Emotional repression
- Empathy
- Ethnicity
- Family
- Friendship
- Humanity
- Identity
- Loneliness
- Loyalty
- Mankind
- Materialism
- Mercy
- Narcissism
- Nature
- Personal change
- Self-expression
- Solipsism
- Stereotyping
- White culture
- White guilt
- White supremacy
- Similar (in Plot, Theme or Style) to:
- Charlie & the Chocolate Factory
- Incredibles
- True Lies
- Review Format:
- DVD
Clever Bond parody - for all the family - that successfully manages to actually be about the family, itself, and why it needs protecting. It also hints at why parenting is the most difficult job of all, since the fate of the world is always in grave danger from parents who produce monsters bent on world domination.
This visually-imaginative movie easily defies and transcends its own limited genre. The additional bonus is an ethnic mixing which matches that of the leading actor and his director; while implicitly offering a vision of a world where familial bonds are stronger than any other: The villain-defying laser beam hidden in a wedding ring being a case in point.
Unusually, this film is proud of its ethnicity rather than downplaying it or using it as a mere form of dramatic exoticism - as is usual in Hollywood. So comfortable with it, in fact, that it can afford to make jokes at its own expense.
The only hard-to-avoid flaw is that the two siblings here are very good, but not precocious enough for adult audiences to take them as seriously as the adult players are taken. This dramatic imbalance makes the grown-up audience long to see what the adults are getting-up-to more than they do the eponymous kids – otherwise, this exceptional film would have been truly great.
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