Spy Kids 2: The Island of Lost Dreams (110 mins, U) Directed by Robert Rodriguez; starring Antonio Banderas, Alexa Vega, Daryl Sabara, Steve Buscemi
The Sum of All Fears (124 mins, 12) Directed by Phil Alden Robinson; starring Ben Affleck, Morgan Freeman, James Cromwell
Christie Malry's Own Double-Entry (93 mins, 18) Directed by Paul Tickell; starring Nick Moran, Shirley Anne Field, Kate Ashfield
The American President doesn't come too well out of this week's new Hollywood movies. In one case, he's a dimwitted creep with an ingratiating smile and an overindulged daughter constantly getting him into trouble. In the other, he's a thick politician who can't remember the name of his Russian opposite number, is torn between the hawks and doves in his cabinet and seems a little eager to press the nuclear button. One is a comedy, the other a supposedly authentic thriller. Both seem rather realistic.
The better of the two is Robert Rodriguez's comedy Spy Kids 2: The Island of Lost Dreams which presumes you know that in the earlier movie teenage Carmen Cortez and her little brother Juni discover their parents are retired super-spies and decide to carry on the family business. The plot turns on a search for a McGuffin called a Transmooker, a super-gadget stolen from the US President which, in the hands of the wrong people, could spell the end of civilisation.
The trail leads to an island in the Indian Ocean where a mad, sweet-natured scientist (the marvellous, quirky Steve Buscemi) has big trouble with his plans to create an adventure park for kids' playrooms using miniature creatures. It's a cross between the Bond movies, Young Indiana Jones and Jurassic Park and is a lot of hi-tech fun. Children will not feel embarrassed to take their parents and guardians to see it.
The Sum of All Fears is the fourth film based on Tom Clancy's thrillers featuring the CIA operative Jack Ryan, now played by Ben Affleck who is half the age of Harrison Ford who last played the role. To paraphrase Maurice Chevalier, 'Thank heaven for little spies, for little spies get younger every day'.
It's a pretty dull tale in which Ryan, here a 28-year-old protégé of fatherly CIA director Morgan Freeman, teaches his superiors how to start worrying and hate the bomb when a neo-fascist terrorist group acquires an Israeli nuclear device from Syrian peasants. Its aim is to provoke a war between Russia, led by an intelligent, peace-loving President Nemerov (Ciarán Hinds) - and America, headed by an ignorant, belligerent President Fowler (James Cromwell).
A small atomic bomb does get dropped and the movie concludes with a recreation of the finale to The Godfather in which the action cuts between the blessing of a new East-West pact at the White House and the violent elimination of mankind's enemies. The chief villain, a neo-Nazi Austrian plutocrat (Alan Bates), is so wicked that he has a swastika engraved in the back of his watch. Sadly, the picture is directed by Phil Alden Robinson who made Field of Dreams. After this, he can no longer believe that if he builds it they will come.
Paul Tickell's Christie Malry's Own Double-Entry is an ambitious, intermittently effective movie based on a satirical novel written 30 years ago by the promising experimental novelist BS Johnson who commit ted suicide shortly after its publication. Nick Moran plays a psychopathic working-class Londoner who takes a correspondence course in accountancy and decides to conduct his life according to the principles of double-entry book-keeping. He records every aggravation he receives in the debit column and every act of recompense and revenge he takes in the credit column, causing havoc everywhere.
Writer-director Tickell has misguidedly turned a few hints from the novel about the activities of Luca Bartolomeo Pacioli, the Renaissance monk who invented double-entry book-keeping, into a parallel plot. He has also, unwisely, dropped Johnson's ironic first-person commentary and made Christie the narrator. Conducted with a mixture of clumsiness and imagination, it's a one-joke movie, but a creditable affair that the ICA has done well to take off the shelf and put into distribution.
