July 30, 2003 -- “Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over” is a high-spirited, imaginative movie romp in three dimensions. Unfortunately, the story and characterizations are the weakest of the three movies in the Spy Kids series and the three-dimensional effects utilize a cheap form of 3-D presentation. Still, its not a bad movie for kids who have never seen a 3-D movie.

Spy Kids 3-D brings back practically all the characters from the first two films and adds some new ones. A new villain, The Toymaker (played by Sylvester Stallone), arrives on the scene to menace the spy kids. Also new to the series are three video game beta testers, Rez the leader (played by Robert Vito), athletic Arnold (Ryan Pinkston) and Francis the brain (Bobby Edner). Another new character, a mysterious video gamer named Demetra is played by Courtney Jines. OSS spy leader Francesca Giggles is played by Salma Hayek (“Frida”).

The story has kid spy Carmen Cortez (Alexa Vega) trapped inside a video game run by the evil Toymaker. Her mission was to turn off the game before the minds of all the world's children were enslaved by it. Carmen's brother, Juni Cortez, who has left the OSS spy agency, is recruited to return to the agency in order to rescue his sister. The rest of the Cortez family, spymasters all, seem blissfully unaware of Carmen's fate. Juni must enter the video game alone and work his way into the most difficult levels of it to find his sister, then together they must find a way to shut down the game. Most of the three-dimensional action in the movie takes place inside the video game. Since it is a video game, anything goes. Writer-director Robert Rodriguez (also director of photography) brings his great visual imagination to bear on this fantastic landscape. There is a lot of eye candy in this film. In addition to being a star of the film, Alexa Vega also sings the title song over the credits, as she did in Spy Kids 2.

The first Spy Kids film was a delightful surprise. The second was almost as good, but the third is a disappointment. It fails to develop characters and the storyline is not compelling. The 3-D effect doesn't really add anything to the movie. The 3-D technology used, an anaglyphic color-coded system, is not the best 3-D technique, but it is one of the cheaper systems to use. There is a noticeable ghosting of lines around the images, causing some haziness, and the colors are subdued and altered by the 3-D process. It was an effect that is more annoying than thrilling. This process uses the familiar cardboard 3-D glasses with one blue lens and one red lens. The dual images for the left and right eyes (made with a dual camera) are color coded on the film. The glasses act as filters to separate the right and left images. Your brain combines the two for a 3-D image. You get to keep the glasses.

Last year, I saw a 3-D film called “Space Station”. It used the superior polarization method of 3-D. The 3-D image in “Space Station” was far superior to that of “Spy Kids 3,” but it requires more expensive polarized glasses and a much more expensive polarized projection system. 3-D-equipped theaters often use two projectors, one for each eye, the images from each projector and polarized so that, looking through polarized glasses, the left eye sees an image originally filmed at a slightly different angle than the right eye (dual cameras are used for this purpose), giving the illusion of three dimensions. There is an even better 3-D method using special glasses with high-speed, remote-controlled LCD shutters to better isolate the left and right images.

The anaglyphic method used in “Spy Kids 3” and other 3-D movies, does not require two projectors, or a specially-equipped one. It can be shown on a standard, unmodified movie projector, making the film much more practical to present. The somewhat blurry presentation can cause headaches, however, so some 3-D breaks are built into “Spy Kids 3” to reduce eye strain. The comparison to “Spy Kids 3” is probably unfair, since “Space Station” is also an IMAX film, using not only superior film (10 times the size of the image on standard 35mm film), but a superior projection system as well (using superior threading, illumination and framing; IMAX also uses a film speed double that of standard projectors). This film rates a C.

Click here for links to places to buy or rent this movie in video and/or DVD format, or to buy the soundtrack, posters, books, even used videos, games, electronics and lots of other stuff. I suggest you shop at least two of these places before buying anything. Prices seem to vary continuously. For more information on this film, click on this link to The Internet Movie Database. Type in the name of the movie in the search box and press enter. You will be able to find background information on the film, the actors, and links to much more information.

Copyright © 2003 Robert Roten. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.

Robert Roten can be reached via e-mail at .