Doing for superhero flicks what Spy Kids did for secret agent films, We Can Be Heroes, Robert Rodriguez’s return to lo-fi children’s films, is frenetic but not always fun.
The set-up is simple: infallible superhero team The Heroics — including Marcus Moreno (Pedro Pascal), Miracle Guy (Boyd Holbrook), Tech-No (Christian Slater) and Sharkboy (JJ Dashnaw) and Lavagirl (Taylor Dooley), making this a quasi-sequel to Rodriguez’s 2005 flick — are kidnapped by an armada of invading aliens, giving Earth just three hours before the takeover. For her own safety, Missy (YaYa Gosselin), Moreno’s daughter but with no special abilities, is placed in an impregnable underground bunker with the superpowered offspring of The Heroics.
At this point, Rodriguez creates an interminable clunky scene in which the kids introduce their powers — including bendiness, a dynamic singing range, slow motion, rewinding and fast-forwarding time, the ability to transform faces — and it soon becomes clear that the youngsters will have to evade the director of the Heroics programme, Ms Granada (Priyanka Chopra Jonas, doing kids’ film acting to the hilt), and come together to rescue their parents and save the planet.
Throughout the flick, Rodriguez sews in some fun digs at comic-book movie tropes, around the genre’s penchant for holding brawls in overpopulated cities or the fiddly nature of superhero costumes (none of this stuff reaches Incredibles level of genius). And, as with the Spy Kids flicks, it’s gaudy, good-natured and inclusive. But the plotting, even by kids’ film standards, is predictable and rudimentary, the action scenes (an escape by hover train, the stealing of an alien supply ship) are lacklustre and the messaging heavy-handed (there’s so much over-delivered guff about the need to work together and believe in yourself). Some of the characters register — Guppy (Vivien Lyra Blair), the offspring of Sharkboy and Lavagirl who can shape water, and Ojo (Hala Finley), who can draw events five minutes into the future — but more often than not the kids don’t have personalities beyond their powers, while the likes of Pascal, Holbrook and Slater are reduced to endless scenes of bickering among themselves.
Depending on your point of view, Rodriguez’s filmmaking, especially the visual effects, has scrappy, low-budget charm or bears no comparison to what we see in the MCU (the Sci-fi Set Design 101 of the spacecraft interiors has a plot reason). It’s a film with its heart firmly in the right place but very little else. And that includes not one but two terrible cover versions of Bowie’s title track, a song about love across the Berlin Wall repurposed for a by-the-numbers training montage.
