Perhaps I’m prejudiced. I don’t like 3-D movies, and with — I believe — good reason. But I found this film to be at least three cuts below its two predecessors.

Juni Cortez (Daryl Sabara) has quit the OSS and gone to work as a private eye. But he is called back by George Clooney, now the president of the United States, to stop the entire world’s youth from being captured in an unwinniable virtual reality video game created by an evil villain known only as the Toymaker (Sylvester Stallone, of all people!). One of those who has already been captured is sister Carmen (Alexa Vega). Sent into the game by Donnagon and Cesca Giggles (Mike Judge and Salma Hayek), Juni must fight his way up to level 4, rescue Carmen, and then reach the unbeatable level 5 and … beat it. Luckily, he has the help of his crippled grandfather (Ricardo Montalban).

Far more than the second film, this one emphasizes technology. That’s not necessarily bad, if coupled with a good plot and good characters. But the characterization here is far less important than it is in the first two films, and all the plot is, is level 1 … level 2 … level 3 … Bringing in almost all the major characters from the first two films (including Alan Cummings, Tony Shalhoub and Bill Paxton) for an action climax is a nice idea, but doesn’t make up for an hour and a half of ho-hum adventure in techland.

Making this film 3-D (or, to be more exact, partly 3-D) was also not the best of ideas. Back when I was almost ready to graduate from grade school, there was a sudden surge in 3-D films and comic books. The films, as I remember, used a special polarized-light technology; the comics used the more familiar red-green technology, which produced black-and-white 3-D. Both technologies used special glasses. The polarized-light glasses are obviously considerably more expensive than those made of cardboard and red and green cellophane lenses; so this film relies not on the polarized-light technology but on the red-green technology, which, however, has been upgraded to the point that it can be embedded in a color film. However, this doesn’t keep it from being extremely inconvenient and uncomfortable to attach those glasses over the top of a pair of prescription lenses; it doesn’t keep the left eye from being darker than the right; it doesn’t prevent the need for removing and replacing the special glasses at regular intervals. IMHO, 3-D movie technology is generally not much more of age than it was fifty years ago.

The theater was full of kids — at whom the movie was aimed — and even they were getting restive after an hour and a half. ⁽¹⁾

Supposedly, this was the end of the Spy Kids arc. I think it deserved a better ending than this one.

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⁽¹⁾ When we saw Seabiscuit earlier the same day, the average age of the viewers was probably somewhere between 50 and 70.