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We Can Be Heroes Movie Review: Priyanka Chopra & Pedro Pascal's Superhero Film Underestimates Young Audience
Available On: Netflix
Duration: 100 minutes
Language: English
Story: The superhero children's film is a stand-alone sequel to the 2005 release The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl. The film follows a group of super kids who have to step in to save the world after their superhero parents have been kidnapped by aliens.
Review: We Can Be Heroes is a film made purely for kids with the direct message that kids are the future. The film follows YaYa Gosselin as Missy Moreno, who despite being a Heroics' kid does not have any superpowers. After losing her mother who was also a Heroics, she makes a deal with her father Marcus Moreno (played by Pedro Pascal) that he will never return to the field. Marcus ends up breaking the deal when the world is under attack by an alien race.
Missy for safety has been placed in an underground bunker with the other super kids. The young superheroes after watching their parents get attacked and kidnapped by the alien forces break out of the bunker and head to the spaceship to save their parents.
The film is directed by Robert Rodriguez who is best known for films like From Dusk Till Dawn (1996), Once Upon a Time in Mexico (2003), Alita: Battle Angel (2019), but he is also known for the Spy Kids series and The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl (2005). We Can Be Heroes also follows its predecessors and mainly brings back the nostalgia for the 90s and early 2000s kids with cheap sets, bright colours, comic acting and slapdash CGI.
The film's story, screenplay and dialogues have been written from a child's perspective, where the adults are always changing their minds, making up new rules and make questionable decisions when children can do so much better if given a chance. The makers, however, end up spending too much time setting up little details that the young audience wouldn't notice or even care for. If the same screen time would have been used on setting up the story better or developing the characters more We Can Be Heroes would have also been enjoyable by the adult audience.
All adults in the film including Priyanka Chopra, Pedro Pascal, Christian Slater, Sung Kang and others, unfortunately, come off as plastic versions of themselves and are given little to nothing with work with. Kid stars YaYa Gosselin, Andy Walken, Nathan Blair, Vivien Lyra Blair and others are the real heroes of the film. They manage to present the film with sincerity despite its flaws.
Overall, We Can Be Heroes underestimates the young audience with a half baked plot, when its predecessors like Spy Kids had so much more to offer even a decade ago.
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