Spy Kids: Special Edition

If you haven't yet seen Robert Rodriguez's whip-smart, live-action cartoon, you now have one more chance to catch it on the big screen. The tale of two preteens, Carmen (Alexa Vega) and Juni (Daryl Sabara), who become secret agents when their parents (Carla Gugino and Antonio Banderas) are kidnapped by a deranged kid's TV show host (Alan Cumming, simultaneously channeling Willy Wonka, Hans Conried and Pee-wee Herman) is at once the funniest film of the year so far and one of the best kids' movies of the last decade, inhabiting as it does a no-holds-barred children's storybook world in which anything can happen and children are proactive heroes rather than tearful moppets. It seems, however, that it wasn't enough for Rodriguez, who has gone back and added a new sequence he was previously unable to afford the effects for, expanding upon a brief throwaway gag involving Juni's underwater bladder control. In the longer scene, we get to see a distinctive yellow stream that awakens a cavern of blatantly computer-generated sharks. It's unnecessarily gross, expository and fake, and the movie was better without it, though it doesn't really mar the final product too badly. One only wishes that more directors, especially auteurs with final cut like Rodriguez, would leave well enough alone once their films are in theaters. With luck, this "special" sequence will be optional on the DVD; Rodriguez's original plan was to reconceive the cut scene for the sequel, which would have been a better idea.