THE ADVENTURES OF SHARKBOY AND LAVAGIRL IN 3-D
Directed by Robert Rodriguez
Reviewed by Sean Burns
PHILADELPHIA WEEKLY 06/03/05

In order to review a movie, the first step is to look at it, which is something I sadly couldn't do throughout most of THE ADVENTURES OF SHARKBOY AND LAVAGIRL IN 3-D. Friends, I tried my best -- but Robert Rodriguez's sloppy low-tech 3-D sequences are a one-way ticket to migraine central.

Not to be confused with that relatively new IMAX 3-D process, which supposedly actually works, Rodriguez's latest kiddie flick --like his SPY KIDS 3-D from a couple years back-- uses a shoddy digital video variation on the old '50s red-and-blue paper glasses routine.

And if you want a real laugh, try sitting next to someone wearing spectacles, and watch them spend the next hour and a half trying to figure out where they're supposed to put the fool things if they actually want to see anything.

Lucky for them, in Rodriguez's cheapie 3-D world seeing stuff is overrated. It's an unfocused landscape with blurry stabs of neon --almost as if TRON's background black-and-whites were replaced by baby-**** green. The vaunted three dimensions are actually just three separated pancake-flat planes of action-as though there are a couple rows of cardboard crap floating between you and the screen.

I try to avoid most Robert Rodriguez movies, as they usually come off like amateur affairs he cooked up in his Austin garage with some famous friends. But this year's SIN CITY (perhaps not coincidentally co-directed with comic-book god Frank Miller) threw me for such a giddy loop I vowed to give his next flick a try.

Perhaps the guy is only as good as his collaborators, as Rodriguez wrote THE ADVENTURES OF SHARKBOY AND LAVAGIRL IN 3-D with his 7-year-old son Racer, and the whole thing seems to have been spit out with the breathless nonsensical hysteria of a child on a sugar rush.

It's some babble about a young dreamer who dreams up the title superheroes while daydreaming at school, and then all his dreams come true because he needs to go to the dreamland called Planet Drool and rescue other children's dreams from a bad guy (who doesn't like dreams, natch) called Mr. Electricity. So our hero needs to dream to save the day.

The word "dream" is used so many times during SHARKBOY AND LAVAGIRL that I started playing that game journalist Matt Taibbi uses to get through campaign speeches, wherein he mentally substitutes the word "penis" for buzzwords such as "freedom."

In short: "You can't take away a child's penis, it's all they really have in this world." "Your penis is responsible for all this, so only your penis can find a way out." "I might be your dad, but I still have penises of my own."

Hey, it beats looking at the screen.