Review: 'Spy Kids: All the Time in the World' doesn't deserve your time

Film:  Spy Kids: All the Time in the World  (U/A)
Director: Robert Rodriguez
Cast: Rowan Blanchard and Mason Cook, Jessica Alba, Jeremy Piven, Joel McHale, Alexa Vega, Daryl Sabara, Ricky Gervais
Rating: **

Spy Kids deals with time travel. To enjoy the film, retrogression, not revisiting your inner child would be a necessity. Perhaps I’m being too harsh. The film after all, was made with children in mind. And Robert Rodriguez does love to push the envelope with filmmaking. But providing cards that dispense fragrances is where you should draw the line.

On with the story then. Cecil (Mason Cook), a hearing-impaired anagrams whiz and his prank-loving sister Rebecca (Blanchard), learn in good time that their mother (make that step-mother, as Rebecca would cruelly point out) Marissa Wilson (Alba) is a spy working for the OSS (Organisation of Super Spies). Their father (McHale) plays a spy-hunter on TV, but neither catching spies nor finding enough time for his kids, is an unhappy man. 

When time starts mysteriously speeding up, the culprit proves to be a mysterious figure -- the Timekeeper, who is in league with Tick-Tock, a villain whom Marissa took down just seconds before giving birth to the kids’ stepsister.

Ultimately, the kids must team up with Marissa, the original Spy Kids Carmen (Alexa Vega) and Juni (Daryl Sabara) Cortez, and talking robot dog (Gervais) to, um, save the world!

The plot, way far more convoluted than represented here, carries the same message that most family films do about how families should stick together before its simply too late. All well and good; you really can’t hope for an exceptionally nuanced (not the same thing as a convoluted) plot in every child-centric espionage-based endeavour that comes your way. Ditto for the performances. (Piven does a decent job, though) Good humour, however, can make or mar a kiddie flick and, while the onslaught of tiresome time-related puns are all right, one wishes the fart and vomit jokes that show up intermittently simply wouldn’t. Gervais, perplexingly, is somewhat funnier on four legs than he could ever manage to be on two. Though the 3D rendering wasn’t as bad, it is a bit of a task.

All the Time in the World is the worst kind of ‘mindless’ film being neither particularly fresh nor interesting. The film is the worst case scenario, for which a well-stocked DVD collection of classics is for.

About Aromascope

Unlike Cecil, who supposedly possesses out-of-this-world olfactory powers, distinguishing from one scent from another on the aromascope is a bit of a task. All the scents mildly bear some semblance to bubblegum.

The numbered card, which must be consulted time and again as the digit appears in a scene, is a hindrance to your enjoyment of the film. (Enjoy it, if you could). So much for our journey into the fourth dimension.