All Wet: SPONGEBOB MOVIE: SPONGE OUT OF WATER

Nickelodeon’s long-running series SpongeBob SquarePants is characterized by sweet, cheery cartoon surrealism. In recounting the bizarre adventures of a happy sponge who lives in a pineapple under the sea, it has built a gentle world of nautical nonsense, non-sequiturs, asides, incongruous mixed media inserts, goofball slapstick contortions and silly voices. The show will do anything for a ridiculous sight gag or goofy sound effect, but loves its characters so earnestly and consistently that it rarely devolves into free floating weirdness. At the loveable center is SpongeBob himself. Created by Stephen Hillenburg and voiced by Tom Kenny, he’s one of the all-time great cartoon characters, a source of endless silliness springing forth from a supply of inexhaustible optimism. Even if a story is a dud, I still like this sponge.

In The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water, the second big-screen outing for this TV world, the jokes aren’t as dense as they should be. But we’re talking about a cartoon that has been on the air since 1999, hasn’t been in theaters since 2004, and is accustomed to telling stories 10 or 11 minutes long. A bit of franchise fatigue should be expected. It sets in as series regular director Paul Tibbitt and screenwriters Glenn Berger and Jonathan Aibel, of the Alvin and the Chipmunks squeakquels, stretch a thin bit of plot to goof around for over 90 minutes. There’s not much there in terms of emotional investment or compelling story, but at least the time passes largely painlessly. It’s hard to dislike something so bright, chipper, and eager to please, even as I found myself wondering why this story was worth telling at all, let alone outside the confines of the show.

There’s really no reason the movie should work, or be as charming as it often manages to be. The characters aren’t as fresh as they once were, and their new film recycles storylines done better in their first film, and in some of the series’ classic episodes. (There’s even a totally unsuccessful attempt to recreate the magic of “The F.U.N. Song.”) Sponge Out of Water concerns yet another diabolical plot to steal the town of Bikini Bottom’s beloved top-secret Krabby Patty formula, zealously protected by Mr. Krabs (Clancy Brown) from his tiny megalomaniacal rival restaurateur, Plankton (Mr. Lawrence). It’s up to the loyal Krusty Krab fry cook SpongeBob to save the formula, a process that’s longer and more elaborate than TV would allow, with an epic food fight, angry mobs, magic, and time travel, culminating in a slapstick superhero parody that somehow doesn’t mention Mermaid Man and Barnacle Boy.

We get a great deal of hand-drawn zaniness that draws in all the series regulars – dim starfish Patrick (Bill Fagerbakke), fussy Squidward (Rodger Bumpass), squirrelly Sandy (Carolyn Lawrence) – and cameos from memorable supporting characters, with quick wordplay and rubbery gags. Eventually, it concludes with the gang washing ashore on the trail of a missing recipe. There on the beach, they interact with live action extras while rendered in 3D CG animation. This sidesteps one of my favorite running jokes in the series, representing SpongeBob out of water as an actual dry sponge on a stick waggled about by an obvious puppeteer. Making him and his friends exaggerated CG things walking around a beach is an okay bit of colorful nonsense, but seems a concession to something more ordinary and predictable than the usual SpongeBob tone.

I didn’t mind it too much, but it goes on far too long. The picture seems a little underpowered, burning bright with engaging zippy randomized cartoonishness, then losing steam the longer it runs. But where else will you see Antonio Banderas play a character named Burger Beard, an exaggerated pirate who just wants to start his own food truck? Or a cosmic dolphin named Bubbles? Or singing seagulls? Or a burger-shortage inspiring full-on Mad Max apocalyptic mob mentality? Or multiple hilarious montage parodies? Or repeated trips through a 2001 time-travel kaleidoscope wormhole set to an original Pharrell song? You’re never exactly sure what’s around the next corner in Sponge Out of Water, as much a sign of its desperation as its inspiration. It could’ve been more, but as a modestly effective bit of harmless superfluous silliness, it’s not so bad.

Exhaustible: THE EXPENDABLES 3

A reunion of box office has-beens, the first two Expendables movies worked on some dumb level through nothing more than the novelty of seeing Sylvester Stallone and fellow veteran action stars like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jean-Claude Van Damme stomping through scenarios reminiscent of their greatest hits. But by the time we arrive at The Expendables 3, the novelty has worn off. There should be something poignant about the idea of an aging team of mercenaries confronting their mortality and finding new ways to push old bodies through a young-man’s sport. Instead, it’s a mechanical and joyless contraption that grinds out what they think we want to see them doing. So here’s Stallone, squinting through displays of physicality no 68-year-old could ever pull off. To his credit, he sometimes does pull it off. But by the time he’s outrunning a collapsing building and leaping towards a waiting helicopter, it’s clear this is mere wish fulfillment.

The story in this outing is stupidly simple. After a failed mission, Stallone retires his team of old buddies (Jason Statham, Wesley Snipes, Dolph Lundgren, Randy Couture, Terry Crews). He contacts a black market talent scout (Kelsey Grammer) to find a younger team to help set things right for his C.I.A. contact (Harrison Ford). The mission fails again. This time, the villain (Mel Gibson) captures the muscled twentysomethings (Kellan Lutz, Ronda Rousey, Victor Ortiz, Glen Powell). Now it’s up to the old team to save the new team. Built around three action sequences – a train rescue that segues into a firefight with Somali pirates, an infiltration of a skyscraper, and a siege of an abandoned warehouse or something – the script, by Stallone and Olympus Has Fallen writers Creighton Rothenberger and Katrin Benedikt, continually maneuvers the cast into place, half-heartedly giving them lame wisecracks and rote motivations until the shooting can start again.

It’s overburdened with too many characters. I didn’t even mention Antonio Banderas as an endearingly talkative out-of-work mercenary desperate to get back in the fight and a brief appearance of Jet Li, who gets a surprisingly tender moment with Schwarzenegger, or as tender a moment as a meat-grinder macho movie can supply. With all these people standing around, the action scenes don’t have time for complicated choreography or suspenseful crosscutting. You can almost see contract negotiations and scheduling difficulties on screen with sequences seemingly slapped together with whatever shots were most convenient to everyone’s calendars. I doubt the whole Expendables team ever shared a single frame together. A character is left dangling in an elevator shaft for nearly the entire final melee. Every time we cut back to him straining for the next ledge, I thought, “Oh, yeah. He’s here, too.”

The hectic but flatlining action is mind-numbingly violent, but bloodless since it’s PG-13 this time. Thousands, maybe millions, of rounds of ammunition are expended in the course of this movie, leaving hundreds of unidentified, usually ethnic-coded, figures blown apart. It’s tiresome, repetitive, a little offensive, and cartoonish in its lack of weight or resonance. “How hard is it to kill 10 men?” Gibson yells at his flunkies after an entire third-world army fails to even injure an Expendable. It just goes on and on, gunfire, helicopters, and punches shot in a flat, unremarkable chaotic style. There’s no variety here. They couldn’t even throw in a car chase or a plane crash to mix things up a bit?

I like some of the personalities involved. The new recruits don’t make much of an impression, aside from Ronda Rousey, the first female Expendable. She’s also the only woman to appear in more than one shot in this testosterone overdose. It’s the caramelized veterans who are of some interest, bringing to their roles their histories as screen presences and public figures. When Ford says to Stallone, “good to finally meet you,” there’s a microscopic twinge of action movies past as Indiana Jones shakes Rambo’s hand. It’s the little things, like Snipes (Stallone’s Demolition Man foe) having his character joke he’s been in prison for “tax evasion.” Ha. Ha. Worse is Gibson’s winking at his checkered recent history, snapping that the heroes would be scared if they saw him angry. That’s a tad too close for comfort. At least the script gives him one good goofy villainous threat: “I’ll cut your meat shirt open and show you your heart!” That’s the kind of line B-movies are made of!

Alas, this movie’s too flavorless for those pleasures to save. It’s a largely anonymous work coasting off the personalities on screen while director Patrick Hughes does what he can with the material he’s been given. Not much can be done. This series has exhausted what little inspiration it once had, having never quite lived up to its fullest potential. There’s something almost sweet about a movie full of AARP action figures passing the torch to Jason Statham and now on to even younger potential action stars. But it’s buried under the grinding routine of so much mindless carnage and nothing story. I just didn’t care. It thinks it’s funny, exciting, and maybe even a little melancholy, what with it’s closing Neil Young sing-a-long and all. But it’s mostly sad and tired.

Needs Sharpening: MACHETE KILLS

With Robert Rodriguez, there’s never a question of authenticity in his pulpy prefabricated cult films. He’s a filmmaker following his passions and interests, which largely sit squarely within a desire to reconstitute comic books, B-movies, and exploitation pictures in a variety of partially-postmodern configurations. At his best, he doesn’t just borrow from iconic and disreputable genre ideas and finds a way to create some honest iconic moments of his own, images that stick in the brain long after context starts to fade. I’m thinking of the opening rival-spies-in-love montage of Spy Kids (his greatest), Johnny Depp’s bleeding eyes partially hidden behind sunglasses in Once Upon a Time in Mexico, and Laura Harris soon to stalk out of the skin she’s showing off to reveal her otherworldliness in The Faculty. His best movies are movie movies, pure playful pleasure.

That’s what made Machete, the 2010 expansion of a spoof trailer from his Grindhouse collaboration with Tarantino, enjoyable. Its clever blend of button-pushing political commentary and bloody Tex-Mexploitation action swirled around a stoic performance from craggy tough guy character actor Danny Trejo as the eponymous ex-federale defender and protector of underdogs everywhere. The movie was knowing without being too knowing, laugh-out-loud exciting, not because of faux-shoddiness, but through sheer force of earnest silliness. You could never accuse Rodriguez of being above cartoony violent gags. I still smile when I recall the sequence that found a baddie stabbed with a meat thermometer, a funny enough moment that becomes even better when the building explodes and the man’s corpse flies into frame, the thermometer still in place, now reading “Well Done.”

Rodriguez is always having fun. The question is whether the audience gets to have the fun with him. In the case of Machete Kills, there’s not a single moment as enjoyable or memorable as what happened to that meat thermometer. It’s a movie that’s content to run its gory gags into the ground. I mean, you’ve seen one guy get sucked up into the propellers of a helicopter or boat engine, you’ve seen them all. One is a shock. A dozen is quite literally overkill. The deliberately silly sequel finds Machete recruited by the President of the United States (Charlie Sheen, credited here under his birth name, Carlos Estevez) to track down Mendez (Demian Bichir), a Mexican madman. This mastermind wants the U.S.A. to invade Mexico with the goal of cleaning up the drug cartels and thinks threatening to launch a missile towards Washington D.C. will help make up the President’s mind. Not while Machete is an option.

The convoluted plot soon involves a motley and intriguing cast made up of Oscar winners and nominees, disgraced celebrities, a sitcom actress, former child actors, and a pop star. Amber Heard plays Miss San Antonio, who is secretly a federal agent assigned to be Machete’s handler on this mission. On his way to find Mendez, he runs across a brothel filled with militant prostitutes (led by Alexa Vega, a dozen years ago a co-star of Spy Kids) under the direction of a madam (Modern Family’s Sofía Vergara) who takes the term maneater uncomfortably literally. Her daughter (Vanessa Hudgens) supposedly knows how to find Mendez. Complications arise, and soon a string of assassins (killer cameos for Walton Goggins, Cuba Gooding, Jr., Antonio Banderas, and Lady Gaga) and a villainous weapons tycoon (Mel Gibson) want a piece of Machete too. Eventually Michelle Rodriguez, returning from the first film with her army of underground justice-seeking Mexicans, rolls into the picture as well.

It’s all fairly self-involved as it largely ditches the sociopolitical digs of the first film for adolescent snickering, repeating gags over and over with diminishing returns and otherwise overstaying its welcome. The balance is all off, running through CGI viscera repetitively splattered, twisting around without much momentum, and picking up a nasty habit of offing its female characters with little thought the instant the plot is done with them. This is a movie that thinks a machine gun bra is the height of humor and then proceeds to go no further. It’s worth a smirk, but not much else, especially when the whole movie plays out like one half-baked idea after the next. I bet screenwriter Kyle Ward (working from a story from Rodriguez) thought they seemed funny at the time.

And yet, as exasperating and only fleetingly entertaining as I found Machete Kills, Trejo doesn’t overplay his hand. Machete remains a great pulpy character, tough and no-nonsense, ready to get the job done. Even as the film grows unsatisfying around him, he’s a steady presence that keeps things from falling apart entirely. The movie doesn’t end so much as stop, a series of faux-advertisements promising that Machete will return in Machete Kills Again…In Space! These clips from an as-yet-unmade film, a groovy sci-fi shoot-‘em-up with late-70’s Roger Corman-style effects, are the best part of the very real movie you have to sit through to see them. Now that looks like fun. Maybe Machete Kills is too much of the same thing. I’m ready to launch with Trejo and Rodriguez into the stratosphere and they’re stuck retreading the same old ground.

Knockout: HAYWIRE

Retired mixed martial arts star Gina Carano is the center of Haywire, a terrifically exciting actioner. This is essentially her acting debut, playing Mallory Kane, a tough ex-Marine who works for an independent com- pany hired by the United States government to execute special missions. She’s a secret agent for hire. Carano is perfect for the role. She’s tough. You don’t want to cross her. She has intensity in her eyes and muscle to her physicality. She doesn’t just look like a fighter; she is a fight- er. When her punches land, not only are they convincing, they look like they cause real pain.

That Carano can really handle herself in a fight is no small fact. It’s the very purpose of the film. Every step of the way, she has to fight off attackers. With simply stunning fight choreography, Carano kicks, flips, and punches her way to freedom. The music drops away, leaving only the grunts and thunks to score the action. There’s tantalizing eeriness as the camera stands back and regards with a restraint that suits the judicious editing. Diegetic sound is all we need to feel the full force of these knockdown drag-out fights.

The film could easily have been a routine story of espionage and double crosses, but it’s so energetically and stylishly told that it’s anything but. Directed by Steven Soderbergh from a smoothly complicated script by Lem Dobbs (they last worked together on The Limey, another great thriller), it moves with a slick, artful excitement. We start in the middle of things, with Carano getting attacked in an upstate New York diner by a former coworker (Channing Tatum). It unfolds with quick brutal resourcefulness as she kicks him out cold and then demands a cowering patron (Michael Angarano) give her a ride and patch up her arm. On the way to wherever she’s heading, she tells him her story.

It globetrots through flash- backs revealing that a government bureaucrat (Michael Douglas) hires a security company, headed by a slick suit (Ewan McGregor) consulting with a Spanish counterpart (Antonio Banderas) to rescue a Chinese dissident held hostage on Spanish soil. It appears to be a successful op, and Carano heads off to her next mission, playing wife to an undercover British agent (Michael Fassbender). There she learns she’s framed for murder charges. She escapes, barely finds the time to call a warning to her dad (Bill Paxton), and then spends the rest of the film on the run, leading us back to where we came in and beyond as she pieces together the con- spiracy that put her in this predicament.

It’s so sleek and fast, with nary a wasted shot, it’s practically aerodynamic. The action is well-staged by Soderbergh, whose films are at least as interesting for how the story is told as for the story itself. His cool digital cinematography and editing have a clinical movement to them, laying out spaces with ease and allowing the fights – and the chases, shootouts, and even simple conversational clashes – to unfold with clarity and cold, blunt observational precision. This is gleaming pop pulp filmmaking, hurtling through familiar tropes with an uncommon energy. It’s just plain fun.

And I think Soderbergh and Dobbs had fun coming up with this film too. Carano’s compelling athleticism may be the driving engine of interest here, but the pleasantly jumbled chronology of the plot, the precision of the shots, and the deeply talented supporting cast are just as compelling. There’s a fleeting moment when, during a chase scene, an animal darts across the road. It’s a perfect whimsical moment that’s at once a lovely visual detail, a funny little gag, and an escalation of tension. Soderbergh creates frames that are composed to have information in the background. He doesn’t overwhelm you with visual noise. He invites you to look closer. A moment during a rooftop foot chase finds Carano slinking through the foreground while we can see, tucked away in the corner of the frame, her pursuers a few roofs back. Neither the pursuers nor the pursued has the whole picture, but there’s a thrill in understanding the layout that enhances the stakes. (The moment is twinned in the climax when Carano comes hurtling from the background, smashing into the unaware villain in the foreground).

Steven Soderbergh films are about the stakes inherent when people are very good at their jobs (Erin Brockovich, Ocean’s 11, 12 and 13), which makes it all the more troubling when things go wrong (Contagion, Out of Sight), when people who may at times seem competent aren’t (The Informant!, Bubble, Solaris), when we question the value of what they do (Traffic, The Girlfriend Experience). All of the above applies to Haywire. Carano is good in a fight, but when she beats a path through her former coworkers, it’s destabilizing. She’s been cut loose from her company and her extralegal status does her no good. She may have skill, but the system itself is broken.

The classification allowing the company to do whatever it wants in the name of national security is of no help whatsoever to her. This confident and capable woman has only so much fight in her. She can only run for so long. Confidence and capabilities will mean nothing if she can’t prove her innocence and uncover the corruption. And that’s what makes the movie work so well. Carano has incredible action star charisma. I believed she could beat up any- one she needed to. But the resolution doesn’t rely solely on her physical capabilities. She makes a compelling center surrounded by calculating sliminess. Much like the film itself is proof of the coolness of verisimilitude in a genre of pretenders.

Mind, Body, and Soul: THE SKIN I LIVE IN

The Skin I Live In, a great, nervy thriller from Spanish auteur Pedro Almodóvar, is a film that takes a gut-churning twist in the center with a perverse shock that makes perfect, horrifying thematic sense. It also makes the film incredibly difficult to discuss without spoiling the stark, delirious horror of the surprises. I'm going to attempt to steer clear of discussing it in detail. Instead I'll describe the set-up, talk about tone and theme, and hint at the extent of the gorgeous madness of it all as I try to pick my jaw up off the floor. This is melodrama that starts ever so slightly camp, and then scrapes away any sense of overheated frivolity to become an engrossing thriller that grows steadily more horrifying. It’s an ingenious twisty film of great disturbing depth.

The film begins with a half-imagined, but nonetheless potent, sense of something being very, very wrong and then sets out to deliriously prove that glimmer right tenfold. In a secluded house in the Spanish countryside lives a skilled plastic surgeon (Antonio Banderas). We learn that he’s been a part of most of the successful face transplants in the world. He’s respected and talented, but also mysterious. In his home there is a lab where he works growing and testing synthetic skin. His housekeeper (Marisa Paredes) goes about her business, occasionally interacting with the gorgeous patient (Elena Anaya) locked in an upstairs bedroom. Surveillance cameras allow the surgeon and the housekeeper to keep tabs on her. The kitchen has a bank of monitors on a counter. The surgeon’s bedroom has a large TV on which he can view a larger-than-life real-time image of his captive, staring at her sleeping form at night, much as one would regard a beautiful painting.

What’s going on here? Who is this woman? She wears a skin-colored bodysuit. She doesn’t say much. She seems to be accepting of her fate. Is she locked in of her own accord? What is her relationship to these people who are limiting her mobility, restricting her actions, and yet feeding her well, providing her books, clothes, and art supplies. Perhaps she’s being paid to test the surgeon’s new synthetic skin. When he goes away to a medical conference, he presents data on his new breakthrough. When pressed by a colleague to say what, exactly, this skin is being tested on, he’s coy. It’s animal testing, he insists.  

While the surgeon is away, the secluded house receives an unwanted visitor. It’s the season of Carnival. That’s why the housekeeper’s fugitive son (Roberto Álamo) can walk somewhat freely through the streets. He’s dressed in a gaudy tiger costume and insists his mother let him into the house. Bad idea. The psychopathic son spies the imprisoned patient on the screen, ties up his mother to a kitchen chair and heads upstairs to sexually assault the captive. “You aren’t my son!” his mother shouts at him. “I just birthed you!”

When the surgeon arrives at the home and sees what is going on, he fights the intruder off. After all this, I still haven’t arrived at the most shocking developments the film contains. This is mere prologue. The stage is set for further shocks. In the aftermath of this startling violence, the film unravels, flashing back through time to trace the traumas and the terror underlying the current situations. And that’s when things get really complicated. The film has a complex flashback structure that elegantly floats through time, revealing the full extent of the story’s horrors with a clinical series of emotional slices.

We learn the surgeon is mourning the deaths of his wife and his daughter. They died years apart, in separate tragedies that are revealed over the course of the film. He’s been left consumed by mourning and revenge, a cauldron of emotion held in check and funneled into a medicinal drive to control. Could this have something to do with the young man (Jan Cornet) who has gone missing from his home in a nearby town?

The surgeon’s methodical approach to his revenge never wavers, growing eerier with stillness and patient silence. Banderas delivers such a tightly controlled and nuanced performance that mimics Almodóvar’s relatively restrained stylistic approach here. This is a masterfully outlandish film with wild moments adorned with the director’s typically colorful, gorgeous mise-en-scène. Yet there’s such restraint here, a gorgeous exterior of patience that belies the total chaos beneath.

This isn’t a film of traditional thrills and jump scares. It’s the kind of insinuating horror that slips up under the skin and expands, slowly enveloping you with dread from the inside out. It’s a psychological horror film on the subject of identity. Who are you when everything you are on the outside has been taken away? To merely say that the film is creepy and disturbing and the main character is an unscrupulous plastic surgeon is to wrongly imply that the film is some kind of grotesquerie that lingers on bodily harm. No, though the film is fairly explicit, the grotesqueness of the film is solely on the plot level, the thematic implications a red-blooded, twisty destabilizing force inflicted upon the characters that pulls under the audience as well. The horror of the surgeon is his quiet madness. The horror of the patient is – as we learn – her quiet resilience. Banderas and Anaya have magnificent stares, rich soulful eyes that burn holes in the screen and in this film carry the weight of greater traumas than we can even begin to imagine. At times, I found myself squirming in sympathy with the pain on screen.

The film is a intense, stylish, slinky horror film of turbulent sexuality, violence, death, and identity. There’s a fluidity to the plot and the characters (and the magnificent score from Alberto Iglesias) that matches the lush style and creates a stirringly distressing unity of purpose. Like the best of Almodóvar, the film deals in doubles, in lies, in sexual secrets, in familial traumas, but here it feels fresh all over again. It’s a case of an auteur finding striking new ways to work through his favorite themes. I was carried up into the film’s style and, almost before I knew it, I was horrified and moved in equal measure. The final scene of the film is a knockout, a moment that takes the destabilizing twists of the movie’s melodrama and horror to their most moving conclusion. Yes, I found myself thinking then and several other times throughout, not only does Almodóvar go there, but he earns it.

Less Than Purrfect: PUSS IN BOOTS

Puss in Boots, an anthropomorphized cat with snazzy footwear, first clawed his way to smirking CGI fame with the second Shrek, showing up as a terrific foil and an adorable sight gag with a soft, yet rolling, voice provided in a near purr by Antonio Banderas. The character is a swashbuckling feline, with a twist of Zorro mixed with the roaming Banderas gunman from Robert Rodriguez’s Desperado and Once Upon a Time in Mexico. Needless to say, he was strikingly perfect in the fractured fairy tale universe in which he appeared.

Now that the Shreks have stayed well past their welcome, it’s only natural that one of the most enjoyable supporting characters has struck off on his own (albeit with a small army of credited screenwriters and Shrek the Third director Chris Miller) to forge a potential new franchise for Dreamworks Animation with what is, I suppose, a prequel to those movies. It’s mostly a failure, an entirely inconsequential film that had a minimum of my interest while it ran, but lost it as soon as the credits rolled. It’s a nice try, anyways.

In Puss in Boots the titular rogue swordsman is out to find some magic beans when he runs into a cat burglar, Kitty Softpaws (Salma Hayek), and a talking egg, Humpty Dumpty (Zach Galifianakis). They, too, want the beans, but Humpty and Puss have some backstory to get out of the way. In an extended flashback we learn not only why these two seem to hate each other, we also get a look at the origins of Puss in Boots, a look that answers all kinds of none-too-pressing questions. Why is he an outlaw? Why does he wear those boots? You’ll find out.

With all of this out of the way, the plot can get down to business. The two cats and the egg team up to take the magic beans and grow a beanstalk to the giant’s castle where they will find the golden-egg-laying goose that will make them rich, rich, rich, I tell you! The beans are currently in the possession of a surly, thuggish Jack and Jill (Billy Bob Thornton and Amy Sedaris), who just haven’t been the same since Jack fell down and broke his crown.

Lacking the emotional depth and visual energy of the Kung Fu Panda movies, Puss in Boots tries desperately to wring a few additional notes out of a one- or two-note character by sending him through a sagging plot loaded up with predictable kids movie antics and a few did-I-just-hear-that? innuendos to ostensibly delight the parents who will probably just be hoping their kids don’t ask them to explain later. It’s not entirely without its charms, but those charms are few and far between. Puss’s cat behavior is cute at times as he laps up some milk or is distracted by a beam of light and the voice performance from Banderas is simply delightful. I just wish this cat had something a little more memorable to do.

It’s all rather handsomely animated, even if the frames seem to be a bit sparse and uninteresting, especially compared to dense gag-riddled scenery of the Shreks. But what really seems to be missing most of all is a sense of urgency or necessity. It’s all perfectly harmless and easy enough to watch, but I find it hard to believe it’ll stick in the memory for very long. Even on the way back to my car, I found some of the details slipping away. It’s just barely passable and, especially in the case of whole families who’ll show up and be forced to pay 3D surcharges, that’s just not quite good enough.

Spy Again: SPY KIDS: ALL THE TIME IN THE WORLD

The following may be a controversial claim. Spy Kids is Robert Rodriguez’s best movie. The 2001 feature follows a brother and sister, Carmen (Alexa Vega) and Juni (Daryl Sabara), who discover that their parents (Carla Gugino and Antonio Banderas) are spies after they disappear on a mission. It’s up to the kids to save them. Aside from the great plot hook, Rodriguez’s film is filled with imagination of a quick, candy-colored variety. The action is well paced, the special effects have a kind of cartoonish believability, the jokes are actually funny to an audience of both kids and adults, the supervillain played by Alan Cumming is a perfect balance of silly and menacing, the emotions feel real, and the not-quite-heavy-handed moral is peppy wish-fulfillment and empowerment to kids while still respectful of adults. Here’s a family film that genuinely encourages kids to precociousness and curiosity without making the parents the buffoonish butts of every joke. This is all tied together with Rodriguez’s one-man-band behind-the-scenes energy and love of genre that power his best films. In its eagerness to please and its off-kilter sense of surprise, Spy Kids is essentially a kid-friendly Grindhouse movie.

Alas, we don’t have too little of this good thing. Box office success, coupled with Rodriguez’s obvious love for the material, guaranteed sequels. The second (Island of Lost Dreams) retained a minimum of charm and good-will to justify its own existence, but by the super-gimmicky third feature (Spy Kids 3D: Game Over) the whole thing felt flat and dead, done in by its own cartoonish exuberance and childish excesses. After that came a long period of dormancy, but after eight years here we are again in another summer franchise revival.

Spy Kids: All the Time in the World introduces us to a nine-months-pregnant spy (Jessica Alba) chasing down Time Keeper, a supervillain (Jeremy Piven) intending to manipulate time itself somehow. (It’s never all that clear). She catches him just in time to promptly retire and then race to the hospital and give birth. Her husband (Joel McHale) and step-kids (Rowan Blanchard and Mason Cook) have no idea of her secret identity as a freshly retired spy. Of course, inevitably events conspire to reveal the secret and call the siblings into duty as freshly minted spy kids. It turns out that their dog is actually a robot dog with the voice of Ricky Gervais who proceeds to help them flee the bad guys and escape to the good guys’ headquarters.

To loosely tie the franchise together, original spy kid Carmen is back, this time as a full-grown spy who yearns to restart the spy kids division. She’s given the task of meeting and briefing the new arrivals on the truth about their stepmother. She also hands them a massive info dump and gifts them their very own gadgets. And rest assured that Juni pops up as well before all is said and done. It’s nice to see the original kid spies all grown up, especially since they’re really the only reminder that this premise was once used to tell a good story.

Each successive Spy Kids movie has lowered the bar by stripping out a few more reasons why anyone over the age of twelve would want to watch. By the fourth installment, it’s strictly for-kids-only. There are poop jokes, practical jokes, slapstick, puns, candy, and gadgets. It’s fast, loud, and colorful, but it has a kind of over-caffeinated amateurish spastic energy that grates. At the movie’s start, I had low expectations, but the aggressively pandering button pushing wore out its welcome fairly quickly. I’m sure some kids will like this one just fine, but there’s no reason anyone else should be put through the experience. I love Spy Kids, but as far as I’m concerned, there is really only one film about them, two if I’m feeling generous.

Note: The experience (already in headache-inducing 3D) is billed as being enhanced through “4D Aromascope” and therefore comes with scratch-and-sniff cards handed out with the tickets that are to be smelled according to the corresponding numbers that flash on the screen throughout the film. Aside from the feeling of awkwardness brought on by fumbling around in the dark, trying in vain to catch a whiff of bacon or a diaper on a piece of cardboard, it adds nothing.

Shrek Everlasting: SHREK FOREVER AFTER

All the more disappointing for arriving just two months after How to Train Your Dragon, which soars much higher than any other product every created by Dreamworks Animation, Shrek Forever After is nothing more than a 90-minute curtain call. It’s a joyless exercise in giving a once-promising franchise even less of a reason to exist. Ah, but back in 2001 – nearly a decade, if you can believe it – Shrek seemed so fresh, though computer animation was much younger then, as was I.

Shrek, the story of a giant green ogre (Mike Myers) and his fairy-tale world, is snarky and a little mean, loaded down with instantly out-of-date pop culture references, but I love the way it starts out as a rebuke of the classic fairy tale arcs only to end up conforming to them. Shrek 2, which came along in 2004, is even better. It’s faster, funnier, denser with gags and more ridiculously sublime. With Shrek the Third in 2007, franchise rot began to creep into the foundations. The movie wheezes and creaks more than its predecessors as it pushes a perilously thin plot through a small deficit of jokes. It kind of works, but it’s dangerously close to the edge that the fourth installment tumbles over.

With Shrek Forever After, we’ve left humor and wit far, far behind, along with any reason to care. After all, this is a film with stakes so high that Shrek could not only die, but he could never have existed in the first place. (The plot involves some crazy Rumpelstiltskin scheme that creates an alternate universe wherein Shrek was never born). Despite all that danger to these beloved characters, I simply didn’t care.

Oh, sure, the movie’s animated at the level of quality we’ve come to expect. The voice work from returning cast members Cameron Diaz (as the princess), Eddie Murphy (as the donkey), and Antonio Banderas (as Puss in Boots) is competent. The whole enterprise moves along at a good clip. Missing are invention, joy, and novelty. By now, I’ve seen these characters traipse through so many plots and speak so much banter and snap out so many one-liners that a little more effort is needed to engage me. As appealing as these characters are, they’re no Bugs Bunny or Mickey Mouse. And even those beloved characters were given a variety of things to do in their classic shorts. To watch this fourth Shrek film feels like watching a retread of a retread.

The end credits roll over a selection of clips and images from the previous three films. I suppose it should be a schmaltzy goodbye to a middling-to-good franchise. Instead, it merely points out all the more starkly how better the early films were, and how the series is now twice as long as it should be. The whole thing just made me wish I’d stayed home and rewatched Shrek 2 instead.