Spy Who Came In From the High School: BARELY LETHAL

In no way does Barely Lethal work. It is a failure on every level, an insult to the intelligence of anyone who’d see it. Mere minutes into the runtime, the inconsistencies, inadequacies, and imbecilities began piling up. It is completely devoid of interest, which hurts all the more because its concept is marginally clever and has the right cast to make it work. It’s a mashup between a high school comedy and a spy movie, with young people Hailee Steinfeld (True Grit), Sophie Turner (Game of Thrones), Dove Cameron (Liv and Maddie), and adults including Samuel L. Jackson, Jessica Alba, and Rachael Harris. Doesn’t that sound like a fun time? You can imagine how it could be sold. It’s Mean Girls meets Kingsman! It’s Spy Kids meets The Guest! If only.

The plot concerns a secret school for orphan girls where they’re trained as spies and sent on missions. It’s a skimpily populated program, seemingly run out of an empty warehouse. And how many operations do we see? Well, one girl steals a briefcase. Later, they catch a villain by flying overhead and lassoing her. That’s it. The expectations are apparently so strenuous, though, our lead (Steinfeld) fakes her own death and enrolls in high school as a foreign exchange student. She binge-watches classic teen comedies to prep, so obviously she makes wacky mistakes! Whoopsy-daisy. It’s also a mistake to show us clips from Clueless and the like right at the top, knowing how terrible the next 80 minutes will be. It reminds us of better options.

Anyway, the young woman discovers high school stress is totally hard, what with weird teachers, awkward flirting, and petty jealousies. (Nothing you haven't seen in high school comedies before.) The movie’s one funny observation is that secret agent business is easier than 12th grade. Alas, first-time feature screenwriter John D’Arco and director Kyle Newman (of Taylor Swift’s “Style” video) develop their concept in the most routine way possible, with some low-rent farce, then a few horribly shot, awkwardly edited, phony baloney action beats. The girl’s employer (Jackson, seemingly the only person running the organization) soon discovers her whereabouts. Then, there’s a perfunctory showdown with the villain, who Alba plays like a bored soccer mom in what’s probably the funniest and most consistent performance in the ensemble. She gets that this whole thing is dumb with a capital Duh. Everyone else is as bored as I was. Jackson gives the most lifeless line readings of his career. He could’ve been shooting his scenes on an idle corner of Avengers green screen during lunch breaks.

Forced frivolity abounds in sequences indifferently dumped onto the screen. The kids are enthusiastic enough, but given such mealy mush to speak it’s a wonder they got through a single take without gargling. The writing is overeager straining comedy. It’s a blur of lines tilting towards self-conscious references and over-articulated dirtiness. It's grating. Late in the movie, one girl brags about her figure saying, “It’s P90X, bitch!” To which her rival replies, “More like P90X-tra large, bitch!” First of all, it’s not funny. Second of all, it’s inaccurate. Third of all, it’s repetitive. And why can’t even a terrible movie like this one take its great, potentially clever, concept and run with it instead of devolving into pathetically limp body-shaming snark? Yeesh.

Oh, this is so incompetent. Nothing works. Nothing hangs together. It lacks a coherent point of view, or even narrative momentum. It’s a weak jumble of overlit, lazily blocked, haphazardly cut scenes. There’s no pulse, no imagination, no joy. Best-case scenario, this was a bigger picture scaled down to fit a tiny budget. Too bad that only revealed the lack of ingenuity and creativity all the more. There aren’t thousands of extras or slick CGI, or even good old resourcefulness, to mask its bankrupt nature. I cringed with second-hand embarrassment for a talented cast paid to work on a project so far beneath them I hoped they didn’t get vertigo.

City Scrapes: SIN CITY: A DAME TO KILL FOR

Sin City: A Dame to Kill For is an exercise in style, but director Robert Rodriguez exhausted that bag of tricks the first time. Back in 2005 the man behind Spy Kids and Machete adapted Frank Miller’s black and white Sin City comics, taking stylized panels of smarmy, hyperviolent cartoonish noir and translating them into CGI images. It’s a striking effect. Actors are buried under Dick Tracy-style makeup then green-screened into pulpy tableaus, staging violence and sex between cops and robbers, thugs and strippers, gamblers and punks. Blood spurts white, but clots red. Eye colors and fire are the only other hues in this grimy, high-contrast nightmare city. It is always night. The streets are always wet. And there’s no such thing as an innocent person.

I grew tired of the affected intensity well before the first film ended, but here we are again. Sin City is a dully artificial place totally removed from anything resembling genuine feeling or fun. It’s grim, gory, exaggerated genre grime. Coming from a claustrophobically phony, clammily adolescent mindset, the movies think bullets are awesome, vigilantes’ perverse overkill is justified, and women are only as good as their aim or their bust. It might be fun to take a peek into such a shamelessly exploitative world, but wallowing in it feels uncomfortable pretty quickly. Worst of all, Rodriguez, working from a screenplay by Miller, doesn’t seem to care too much about the intent of his images beyond the striking surfaces. If it were coming from a genuinely ugly place, it’d be offensive, but more authentic. Instead, it’s just boring, reaching for shock value and finding nothing.

Like the first film, A Dame to Kill For features an episodic series of vignettes about bad people who want to hurt worse people. Gravely voiced narrators talk and talk, overexplaining the events in prose so purple it’s like a parody of hard boiled dialogue written by someone who never actually heard it. Some of the stories, like those involving a stripper (Jessica Alba) and her guardian angel cop (Bruce Willis), a bruiser with a warped moral code (Mickey Rourke), and a band of militant prostitutes (led by Rosario Dawson), carry over from the first film. Others are new, but feel of a piece with the monotonous tone. We meet a cocky cardshark (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) who runs afoul of a corrupt senator (Powers Boothe). And in the best story we meet a dopey lug (Josh Brolin) who is roped into the schemes of an alluring femme fatale (Eva Green).

She’s easily the most captivating aspect of the film. Luckily, her story is the lengthy centerpiece, the only plot that runs uninterrupted. Her green eyes match her character’s greed. Her often-naked body is a lure leading men to their deaths for her benefit. Her shamelessness about her selfish predatory nature makes her the most honest person in Sin City, even if it means she’s reliably never telling the truth. Patchy and episodic, the movie flares to life around Green’s fine performance that manages to chew its way out of the artifice around her. Everyone else in the sprawling cast, which also features Dennis Haysbert, Jeremy Piven, Christopher Meloni, Ray Liotta, Juno Temple, Christopher Lloyd, Lady Gaga, and more, fails to make an impact in the monotonous dirge that is life in the Sin City.

The movie expires well before its end credits, with plotlines arriving at their obvious conclusions in obvious ways. There’s no wit or surprise to any of it. Rodriguez is always making films for his own amusement, playing around with filmmaking tools and B-movie concepts just because he can. When he forgets to let us in on the fun, his movies are passion projects for an audience of one. With these Sin City adaptations, he’s stretched a small interesting visual idea much farther than it could possibly go. We’ve been here before and there’s nothing new to see. This remains a strikingly visualized, but thinly imagined place.

It takes noirs' ugly underbelly, scrapes it down to its most exaggerated nastiness, and then shoots its images full of the whitest white and blackest black. A fine idea, but Rodriguez’s visual imagination has hit a wall, leaving the stereotypical surface ticks of noir – hard lighting, inky shadows, smoldering smokiness – without the room to find meaning behind them. Sin City can only exist as fake genre play, and yet for all the work to make it shine, it’s undercooked and stiflingly stylish, suffocating under its own brutish frames. Film can capture great fictional cities, from Gotham and Metropolis to Dark City and Coruscant, allowing us to live in a metropolis of the imagination. But I’ve spent two whole movies in Sin City now and it still hasn’t come to life.

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.

Schlock and Awe: MACHETE

The latest film from Robert Rodriguez, this time sharing director’s credit with editor and special-effects artist Ethan Maniquis, is Machete. It’s based on a fake trailer that he created to show before Planet Terror, his faux 70’s exploitation film that was half of Grindhouse, his genre double-feature throwback collaboration with Quentin Tarantino. But you don’t need to keep up with all the levels of meta filmmaking at work here to enjoy Machete. Sure, it’s loud and sloppy, simultaneously overstuffed and underdeveloped, but this movie is alive, ambulatory with a crazed B-movie spirit and chockablock with goofy, groovy grindhouse gore. It’s the type of movie that, when you hear a doctor explaining the length of the human intestine, you know that it will be valuable information in an upcoming action set-piece.

The great, craggy Danny Trejo slashes his way through the film as the mysterious man known only as Machete. He’s out for revenge on not just one, but two clearly defined revenge paths. Machete’s out to avenge the death of his wife at the hands of an evil, samurai-sword-wielding Mexican drug lord (Steven Segal, of course) and out for revenge against a double-crossing political slimeball (Jeff Fahey). Then again, to put the plot so simply is to ignore great swaths of exposition that are occasionally relevant to the forward momentum and ultimately needed for the film’s big shootout climax.

This racing explosion of schlock and awe manages to work in plot threads about a sort of Underground Railroad for illegal immigrants led by Michelle Rodriguez and a government agent who is on her tail and is played by Jessica Alba. There’s also a group of vigilante amateur border patrollers led by Don Johnson and a red-meat xenophobe senator, none other than Robert DeNiro, who whips up his supporters with ugly racism. After all of that, there’s still room enough in the movie for the troubled wild-child played by Lindsay Lohan and the Catholic priest played by Cheech Marin. One of them is playing against type.

The cast gets to riff on their personas just as much as the movie itself riffs on its inspirations. Trejo steps up and ably fills a role to which a career of playing tough-guys has led him. Lohan’s entrance is great, as is her character’s arc, which is a perfect metaphoric blueprint for a comeback. Segal is the most purposefully entertaining he’s been in a long time, maybe even ever. Fahey, fresh off his scene-stealing stint on Lost, is a perfect growly villain, DeNiro is fantastic, if a little underused, and Don Johnson is made exceptionally sinister with his eyes constantly hidden behind gleaming sunglasses.

This is easily Rodriguez’s best film since Spy Kids, though that says more about the weakness of Rodriguez’s last decade of work. Machete is a rush of junky influences with a spirited 70’s vibe. With so many plot threads and character types mingling with the brute-force efficiency of the bloody action beats, the movie is inescapably messy. But those action scenes are more fun than not, hyper and stylish while still perfectly understandable in construction. And the movie’s a wicked satire that’s, you know, about something real, current and tangible and actually dares to draw blood with its bite. This is sledgehammer-satire that moves with a force and purpose that agitates for basic human rights and sensible immigration policy. The satire’s not exactly coherent, and it’s certainly not clearly explained, but it’s sharp and hilarious nonetheless and the images have lingering power. A priest’s bank of surveillance monitors is arranged like a crucifix. A senator’s racist rant of a campaign commercial intercuts footage of border crossings with extreme close-ups of wriggling insects. A heavily armed Machete walks unharmed into a villain’s house because the guards think he’s the gardener. This isn’t exactly great art – it’s not even an entirely consistent piece of action filmmaking – but it has a raw excitement that carried me along and kept me entertained.