Leave it to Robert Rodriguez to make a high-octane kiddie pic largely set in Mexico and full of music straight from his Hollywood calling card, El Mariachi.  If I had seen Spy Kids as a child, it would have blown my mind, and it's easy to envision the sequel-ready blockbuster-to-be becoming a Star Wars for today's grammar school crowd.

Kids is about a brother and sister who, unbeknownst to them, are the offspring of two of the world's top secret agents.  The film opens with mother Ingrid (Carla Gugino, Snake Eyes) telling young Carmen (Alexa Vega) and Juni (Daryl Sabara) a bedtime story called "The Two Spies Who Fell in Love."  The story, of course, is a non-fictional account of how she and husband Gregorio (Antonio Banderas, Play It To the Bone) met, fell in love and decided to trade in a life of espionage for parenting.  They've been out of the spy game for years but still maintain old contacts and keep up on the latest international terrorist news.

Meanwhile, the star of a children's Teletubby-ish TV show is threatening to wreak havoc on the world (what would a spy film be without a guy like this?).  It seems that Floop (Alan Cumming, Get Carter), the star of "Floop's Fooglies," has been capturing spies and turning them into mutants for his show.  His goal, apparently, is to create a race of atomic super-robots that he will use to do his bidding.  Floop has a sidekick named Minion (Tony Shalhoub, Galaxy Quest) who is the real brains of the operation – a Sideshow Bob, if you will, to Floop's Krusty the Clown.

The catch is that Floop and Minion need an intelligence prototype created by Gregorio to complete their dastardly creations.  They kidnap Gregorio and Ingrid, leaving the two kids to rescue their parents, and the world.  Carmen and Juni get to play with all kinds of cool gadgets and modes of transportation that, frankly, put the recent James Bond films to shame. They also engage in typical sibling battles with each other while they battle Floop's henchmen and cronies.

The special effects in Kids range from really cheesy to quite staggering (at least for a kids' film; we're not talking The Matrix here). Rodriguez has a reputation of making expensive-looking films for peanuts, and he doesn't disappoint here.  Kids cost $36 million, but it looks like two or three times that amount was used.  To keep costs down, Rodriguez, as usual, wore many hats on the set, serving as producer, editor, director, writer, sound mixer and visual supervisor.  Vega and Sabara helped out by insisting they perform most of their own stunts.

The casting here is pretty decent, with Vega the only real standout.  There are a bunch of actors that contribute tiny parts (Teri Hatcher, Robert Patrick), including some veterans of Rodriguez's other films (Cheech Marin, Danny Trejo) and one superstar cameo from the director's From Dusk Till Dawn.  Kelly Preston was originally cast in Gugino's role but backed out because she had just given birth to an evil little Scientologist

Kids reminded me a lot of Cloak & Dagger, a similar kid-oriented spy caper from the early '80s that starred a hot-off-E.T. Henry Thomas.  Like Dagger, this film doesn't dumb down the action for really young kids and, as a result, makes the picture a lot more enjoyable for older kids and adults.

1:28 –

for action sequences