A Year of Garbage Movies #61, “Spy Kids 4: All the Time in the World” (2011)

You know the “Machete” movies? You know Uncle Machete from the Spy Kids movies? Same character, same universe. Which means that a now grown-up Carmen Cortez (still played by Alexa PenaVega), prior to showing up to give a sunny greeting to this newest batch of Spy Kids, had probably just finished pulling out some guy’s fingernails with a pair of pliers to extract information.

I saw the first three Spy Kids movies when they came out in theaters. I was 11 when the first was released, and enjoyed myself. I was 12 when the next was released, and found that it wasn’t the worst way to spend an afternoon. I saw the last at 13 and tried to suffocate myself with a popcorn bucket.

That trajectory continues with Spy Kids 4, which came out 8 years after the previous installment. We’re given a new batch of younglings who will need to stop some cartoonish plot to end the world, as well as a few of the old faces. However, it’s clear at this point that the franchise is on life support.

Ricky Gervais stars as himself if he were a talking robot dog. Joel McHale tries to play a character who isn’t an asshole, which is not playing to his strengths. Jessica Alba stars as a woman who clearly does not want to be a mother, because in the first few minutes she seems to be doing everything she can to pull off a last-minute miscarriage. Later she brings her 1-year-old on dangerous missions, like fighting a horde of generic minions with the toddler strapped in…