The Adventures of Shark Boy and Lava Girl in 3-D? When I first saw the trailer for this one, I thought to myself, you have GOT to be kidding me. However, the more I thought about it, the more it started to grow on me. I fell in love with the uninhibited imagination of it all. And so, on Father's Day, when my daughter and I were considering what to do together, this movie seemed like a fun way to spend a couple of hours.
It turns out that the imaginative story that piqued my fancy came from the son of writer/director Robert Rodriguez, Racer Maximilliano Rodriguez, who also stars as the young Shark Boy in the movie's opening sequence. Max, the main character in this movie, is thus based on Racer and his imaginative dreams.
Max (Cayden Boyd) is a young boy who is often caught daydreaming in Mr. Electricidad's (George Lopez) class at school. When asked to recite what he did over the summer, his imaginative story about Shark Boy (Taylor Lautner), a young boy raised by sharks after a terrible storm separates him from his father and who comes to possess many shark-like qualities such as gills and razor-sharp teeth, and Lava Girl (Taylor Dooley), another young super-hero from the Planet Drool who has the ability to shoot lava and burn anything that she touches, invites much ridicule from his classmates. When cautioned by his teacher to stop dreaming, Shark Boy and Lava Girl are desperate to come to life not to rescue him from school but to get him to rescue them and all of Planet Drool from being overtaken by darkness. Max learns that his dreams are important and that it is up to him to keep them alive.
If ever there was a movie that was just pure fun, this is it. The idea is a simple one, and the entire movie takes on a dream-like quality. The fact that it is 3-D helps to take you to another world. Moreover, each time that we see "Glasses On" (which signals us to put on our 3-D glasses) we are usually headed out of this world to Planet Drool (while "Glasses Off" takes us back to 2-D and to the "real" world). I simply loved the Lava Girl character. Whether it was her pink hair or her fire-y personality (pun intended!) there was definitely something about her that was fun to watch. Two things I noticed about her are that she is always smiling and her hair seems to always billow in the breeze both of which add to the aura of this great reverie. As for Shark Boy, he is very impressive in his fight scenes. According to my daughter who has read all about this movie in Disney Magazine, Taylor Lautner, who portrays Shark Boy in this film, is a gifted martial artist and choreographed his own fight sequences. Although his enemies were animated in after the fact, these scenes were top notch! I wouldn't be surprised if he becomes a huge action star in a few years.
That's not to say that this movie was without its problems. First of all, George Lopez is anything but an evil villainous character, even if his body is completely animated. The dialogue was pretty horrible, including several forced puns that had to be explained since the fun of the pun is in the spelling of the word (such as "Watts up?" or "That really Hertz."). There were also several really bad scenes involving the relationship of Max's parents, scenes that could have and should have been dropped from the movie, in my opinion. In addition, the 3-D glasses, with the Blue and Red lenses, while they were nostalgic and you got to keep them, they were not of the same quality as other 3-D movie glasses that I have used recently (such as those used when watching The Polar Express). The special effects, in general, were pretty cartoonish and not at all believable, but then again, they didn't have to be; this was a dream.
All in all, I really enjoyed the movie, and so did my daughter. I'd definitely recommend seeing it in the theater versus waiting until it comes out on DVD, but at the same time I'd say that I probably won't wind up buying this movie because it just isn't of the quality that I or my family would want to watch it over and over (as opposed to The Incredibles, Finding Nemo, or even Rodriguez's own Spy Kids).
Don't expect too much...just a lot of fun!
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