The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl (2005)

It's been a tough week. Thanks to a Microsoft Security Update I'm having Laptop issues at the moment and the internet continues to make it difficult to actually carry on doing this blog by blocking the things I use to take screencaps... So I wanted something easy tonight. Something that wasn't too deep, and wasn't too morally challenging. And then a post cropped up my Facebook feed about Robert Rodriguez launching We Can Be Heroes, and it reminded me that one of the films on my list is The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl. 

Released in 2005 it stars a young Taylor Lautner who would go on to be terrible in other films too and a young Taylor Dooley, which must have gotten confusing on set, spending most of their time standing and running in front of a green screen I imagine because 99% of this film is CGI... bad CGI.

Max, son of former WCW champion David Arquette, who doesn't realise he actually possesses the Buddhism Mystical power to create Tulpas, dreams up two Superheroes; Sharkboy and Lavagirl, much to the amusement of snotty nosed little shit school bully Linus who generally is a dickhead, but then Sharkboy and Lavagirl appear and they need Max's help because the Planet Drool (which sounds awful but apparently is like a dream paradise) is dying because children aren't allowed to dream any more. So Max and the eponymous hero and heroine have to team up to stop Mr Electric; a weird disembodied television head robot thing, that is actually based on Max's teacher back in the real world. But Mr Electric is secretly doing the bidding of Minus, who is actually Linus, Max's bully.  But thanks to the power of dreams, Max manages to overcome everything and with the help of the girl he has a crush on at school, they destroy Mr Electric and everyone goes on to live their life in paradise.

The special effects in this film were fucking awful. And 11, ELEVEN, different companies worked on them. What the fuck were you doing?! Playing Solitaire? Was that the point? To make them look so awful? Was that the aesthetic you were going for? So horrendously fake so as to be suspension of disbelief? I know it was an alien planet but even the things that were supposed to look real, looked fake. I mean, it's 2005 and this film had a budget of *checks notes* $50,000,000. There was straight to TV Sci Fi movies coming out shot with a fraction of that budget that did better. There's no excuse.

The acting ranged from average to poor; I was impressed with Cayden Boyd who played Max and Taylor Dooley; Lavagirl who I thought both did well. But Taylor Lautner was awful. I don't know how this guy went on to be a star... I really don't. Everyone else was pretty underwhelming, even for a kiddies movie. And the plot, whilst perfectly passably written was alarmingly predictable: there is a peril. There is only one way we can stop the peril. Oh no, we will never stop the peril now. *Moment of Enlightenment*. Peril is defeated. It's a formula that has been done so many times... so many times and yeah I'm aware that every single Marvel movie for the past decade follows the same formula, but they at least put a twist on it or made it interesting. This film didn't really do either.

Yeah I know... I'm ragging on a kids movie and yes it's really come to this, but I will cut it some slack. Having different parts of the planet named after cliché's; The Passage of Time, The Train of Thought, The Stream of Consciousness, The Sea of Confusion, was actually quite original and refreshing and having the premise centred on dreams and dreaming as a plot device was a somewhat fresh approach if not borrowing heavily from NeverEnding Story quite a bit. But that's about where any originally ends and the creeping dry rot of stale, unoriginality sets in.

So it goes without saying that I'm probably not Sharkboy & Lavagirl's target audience here, but this was a movie written...ish and directed by Robert Rodriguez. The same guy who bought us From Dusk Till Dawn, Once Upon A Time In Mexico and Sin City, one of my favourite films, and it really is a below par effort that smells suspiciously like a vanity project. 1 out of 5.