THE ADVENTURES OF SHARKBOY AND LAVAGIRL IN 3-D A film review by David N. Butterworth Copyright 2005 David N. Butterworth
** (out of ****)
If it looks like "Spy Kids" it should. Robert ("Spy Kids") Rodriguez directed it; it features a couple of hip kiddies and sports the tag line "Smaller heroes. Just as super" ("Spy Kids"' tag line was "Real Spies... only smaller"); and, like "Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over," Rodriguez's "The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl" is also filmed in triple dimensions. All that, and my seven-year-old loved it! But there's a good reason 3-D never really caught on, a reason that becomes eminently clear while sitting through "Sharkboy and Lavagirl": it's a pain to alternately don and doff cardboard spectacles simply to experience some annoying inanimate object thrusting itself, unannounced and uninvited, into your personal space. In the case of TAOSALI3D it's altogether obvious that the cheesy 3-D effects are there simply to distract the viewer from the plot's multiple shortcomings--the screenplay was one dreamed up by the director's then seven-year-old son Racer and it plays like one dreamed up by a then seven-year-old, director's son or not. That, and Taylor Dooley (Lavagirl) is no Alexa Vega (Carmen Cortez in the SK franchise). And when you come right down to it Taylor Lautner (Sharkboy) is no Daryl Sabara (SK's Juni Cortez) either. Racer's kiddy conceit isn't nearly as interesting as Dad's biography (Robert is so insistent on doing things his way that he's quit the Director's Guild of America not once but twice!) yet it allows for puns, gimmicky special effects (which grow more mundane as the movie progresses), and slapstick of the very ordinary kind. Bottom line is it's hard to believe this was made by the same guy who brought us "Sin City."
-- David N. Butterworth dnb@dca.net
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