oung Juni Cortez (Sabara), disillusioned by his treatment at the OSS, has left the Spy Kids corps and is now a private investigator helping kids find lost toys, among other things. Fellow Spy Kid Gerti Giggles (Emily Osment) tells him that he's still got family in the corps, but Juni isn't interested.
Juni's more interested in getting a copy of the latest hot video game, Game Over, from a mysterious publisher known only as "The Toymaker" (Stallone). If you beat level five, you win untold riches.
That's when he gets a call from President Devlin (George Clooney). The OSS needs him. Juni's sister, Carmen (Vega), has gone missing.
At OSS headquarters in Austin, Juni gets his assignment from a reformed Donnagon Giggles (Mike Judge), who has been straightened out by his wife, Francesca (Salma Hayek). It seems the Toymaker, who is imprisoned in cyberspace, wants to use Game Over to enslave the minds of young people. Carmen went into the game to stop him.
She went in without backup? Juni asks. Of course, Francesca tells him. You weren't around.
Guilt-ridden, Juni agrees to enter the 3-D world of Game Over to find his sister, who is trapped on level four. There, he hooks up with beta testers: Arnold (Ryan James Pinkston), Rez (Robert Vito), Francis (Bobby Edner) and Demetra (Courtney Jines), who aren't sure whether they want to help Juni—or eliminate him.
With Juni running out of lives, he has only a few hours to succeed before Game Over hits the streets and kids everywhere are imperiled. But beware, the Giggles tell him. Whatever you do, don't let the Toymaker get loose.
Adults are not the target audience
Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over is the third installment in the hugely popular kids' franchise, and by now it's a cottage industry overseen by the real Toymaker, the prodigiously talented Rodriguez. As the credits show, Rodriguez assembled the movie virtually by himself, doing almost everything short of stocking the craft services table. If he could be in front of the camera as well as behind it, I expect Rodriguez wouldn't have need of his talented cast.
This third Kids film seems like it brings back all the characters of the first two movies, while adding a half dozen new ones into the bargain—including Stallone as four cartoony versions of himself. Everyone seems to be having such a swell time it seems curmudgeonly to say that the movie really feels like it's best for children and won't work very well for anyone older than 13.
That said, Rodriguez displays great imagination in bringing what is essentially an overstuffed video game to life in full 3-D computer-generated glory. (That 3-D—accomplished, we are told, with the same digital technology James Cameron invented for his documentary Ghosts of the Abyss—requires those uncomfortable red/blue glasses, which caused a little eyestrain for this reviewer, but otherwise worked well enough.) There are echoes of everything from Tron to The Matrix to the pod race in Star Wars: Episode I—and Jines' Demetra looks like something straight out of anime—all seasoned with Rodriguez's unique Southwestern sensibility.
The movie really centers on Sabara's character, and he demonstrates that he has acquired a lot of poise and confidence since 2001's original Spy Kids. Montalban also takes center stage, outfitted in a CG armored suit that allows him to run, jump and fight (a sentimental gesture, one supposes, as the venerable and once-robust actor has in reality been confined to a wheelchair for the last several years because of chronic back pain). The spunky Vega, now approaching young womanhood, doesn't even appear in the film until it's half over, and the rest of the Cortez family shows up only in the coda.
