The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl Reviews

I personally have no real problem with 3D, as long as it is done well and has a good story and characters. Sadly, that's where The Adventures of SharkBoy and Lava Girl fails. I like Robert Rodriguez and thought his first two Spy Kids movies were very enjoyable and while mediocre I actually thought the third Spy Kids film was better than this too. I will give some credit, the moral is decent if hardly original and there is some energy. But everything else falls flat.

People might say the art direction was colourful and pleasing to the eye. Sorry, for me it was very tacky, gaudy and brash. And as for the 3D, it is actually some of the worst I've seen, it needed more clarity and sharpness and sometimes moved too fast. Also I found it distracting in alternative to enhancing. The soundtrack is rather plodding, generic and unmemorable too.

The script is absolutely awful too. Any parts that tried to be funny made me roll my eyes to be perfectly honest with you, while the story is unevenly paced and very weak and predictable. The characters are just as weak and bland too, the two main characters have their likable moments but there is little chemistry between them and the audience while the supporting characters fare even worse suffering either from being underused or overacted. Overall, the acting is very uneven and way too broad in some cases.

Other disappointments are the poor pace and plodding direction from Rodriguez. So in conclusion, the result is a pretty awful, overstuffed and disappointing effort of a family film. 1/10 Bethany Cox

I remember very well when I watched this flick. I saw it back in the days when there was a DVD rental shops around the corner (I’m not sure abroad but,  in the Netherlands, all these shops are disappearing) so I rented it but I honestly had no idea what it was about but since it was directed by Robert Rodriguez, I was quite eager to check it out. Apparently, according to Imdb, it is so far the worst movie directed by Rodriguez (followed really closely by ‘Spy Kids: All the Time in the World in 4D’)  but, like I said before, I wasn’t aware of this fact before watching it and, as a matter of fact, I thought it was actually better than the Spy Kids franchise. Indeed, I thought the sequels were rather abysmal (I still need to see the last installment but I’m not optimistic) and even though the first installment was not bad, I still slightly preferred this flick. Indeed, I thought the concept was not bad, it was visually pretty cool and I thought it was quite entertaining. At the time, Taylor Lautner was still just a small kid but I thought he was quite charismatic. To conclude, obviously it is nothing really amazing, and  a re-watch might change my opinion entirely, but I thought it was a decent kids flick and it is actually worth a look, especially if you need to entertain your children.