With cinemas closed and a January devoid of new releases, there’s slim pickings in this second shutdown for anyone who wants a new movie. But however desperate you get, please don’t watch We Can Be Heroes for your family movie night.
Netflix has teamed with love-him-or-hate-him auteur Robert Rodriguez to create a spinoff to a flopped family movie from 16 years ago. At first glance it’s just a bunch of superhero kids learning the value of teamwork. What it really is…is a super mess.
A mutated plot from Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius, Sky High and Zoom comes in the form of Missy Moreno (YaYa Gosselin) who’s the one kid without superpowers in a group of kids with superpowers. The commonality is all their parents are in a knock-off Avengers team called the Heroics - and when aliens invade, capturing all the adults, now the kids must become a team to save the day.
There’s an incredible number of increasingly stupid and unbelievable twists, just as there’s an incredible number of superheroes kids are supposed to remember. Who’s on what team? Who’s a secret villain? Who’s a spy? Which ones are aliens now? You’d need a super memory to keep track of them all.
The plot takes so many twists and turns they seem silly instead of exciting. When the stakes and story (like cartoony superheroes) are so exaggerated, you need to ground it in realistic behaviour to balance it out. Here, it never does.
Rodriguez’s bigger problem, however, is his dialogue is corny and inauthentic. As a screenwriter with a 30 year career in Hollywood, this skill should be getting better, not worse. Half of the spoken lines don’t sound like a believable conversation; this simply isn’t how people talk.
We Can Be Heroes has the wacky tone and implausibility of his iconic Spy Kids franchise from the early 2000s, but there’s none of the fun because it all seems fake. (That phony setup in and of itself foreshadows one of the film’s many absurd twists.)
This movie, by the way, is supposed to be a semi-spinoff from Rodriguez’s 2005 fantasy film The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl. Those title characters make cameo appearances (though original Sharkboy actor Taylor Lautner does not reprise his role), but that’s really the only connection. Except for Vivien Blair, who plays the new character of their daughter Guppy - a four-year-old with shark powers who’s an adorable scene-stealer.
Netflix isn’t short of good family movies to see. If you really want something new, look for The Croods: A New Age or Soul, both far better options. The ending and morals are semi-sweet for a bit, but it doesn’t make up for the boring implausibility plaguing the remaining 85 minutes.
If you ask me, we can be doing a lot better than this in the live-action family film department. And with Rodriguez and Netflix’s experience, they know how to do it, too. So try again - but please not with the (already announced) We Can Be Heroes 2.
We Can Be Heroes
3 out of 10
PG, 1hr 37mins. Family Sci-Fi Superhero Adventure.
Directed by Robert Rodriguez.
Starring YaYa Gosselin, Priyanka Chopra Jones, Pedro Pascal, Adriana Barraza, Nathan Blair, Boyd Holbrook, Hala Finley and Christopher McDonald.
Now streaming on Netflix for subscribers.
