There's probably worse ways to spend an hour or so than watching two "Spy Kids" track down their two spy parents, so, if you go along with that, you're in for a feel-good family treat. And there's few palatable ones of those, (in a movie theater, that is.)
Gregorio and Ingrid Cortez (Antonio Banderas and Carla Gugino), a once infamous and now retired spy team, have been kidnaped by the terribly evil and very bad Fegan Floop (Alan Cumming), and the Cortez' children are the only ones with enough spy expertise, inside know-how, to be able to find them.
The spy-kids, Carmen and Juni Cortez (Alexa Vega and Daryl Sabara) set out their first spy mission, complete with lots of "pizzazz, silly inventiveness and genuine sweetness," according to one reviewer, to qualify for a real fairy tale. Somehow, though, it's rated PG-13 for "action sequences and brief language." It must be the language, however brief.
We meet the parents when Ingrid tells the kids a bedtime story, in flashbacks, of how they met when they were rival spies trying to wipe each other out. They fell in love instead, and traded slinking around corners in high disguise for a life of changing diapers in ordinary clothing.
Will the kids rescue them in time? Oh, my.
The movie is written and directed by Robert Rodriguez.
It starts Thursday at market Square East.
