It is only by accident
that this turns out to be the first review I am posting in 2003.
Currently, I am working on board the USS John C. Stennis (CVN-74), and staying
on the ship during the week. The other evening, having nothing better to do, I
decided to check out the offerings at the base theater at the Naval Air
Station at North Island, Coronado, California. The theater is a huge edifice
that I believe is a converted hangar, and it more resembles an old time
neighborhood movie house than any place I've seen in years. For anyone who
grew up back in the 1950s, religiously attending the Saturday double feature
at the local Bijou, watching a movie there is a bit like plunging into a vat
of lukewarm tea while clutching a life preserver of madeleines. On Wednesday
night, the program was a double bill of Agent Cody Banks, directed
by Harald Zwart, and John McTiernan's latest movie, Basic.
Actually, I would have preferred the McTiernan, but it only started after 8:00
PM, so I went into Agent Cody Banks, which had already started
forty-five minutes or so before.
Agent Cody Banks, written by Jeffrey
Jurgensen (story) and Ashley Miller, Zack Stentz, Scott Alexander, and Larry
Karaszewski (screenplay), concerns a teenage boy who is recruited by the CIA
and trained as a spy. His goal is to date a girl whose father, a scientific
genius, is being exploited by some bad guys who want to use one of his
inventions--a "nanobot," a micro-robot that dissolves whatever it
comes in contact with--to take over the world. Agent
Cody Banks is a very silly but modestly
entertaining production. I'm happy I didn't have to shell out hard
cash to see it--the attractions at the base theater are free--but I didn't
feel insulted after having sat through it.
As Cody Banks, Frankie
Muniz strikes the right combination of adolescent awkwardness and would-be
aplomb. Occasionally watching him in action, I was reminded of the
wonderful cartoons William Steig used to run in the New Yorker called
"Dreams of Glory" depicting the fantasies of boys imagining
themselves solving crimes or engaging in feats of derring-do. In the role of
his crush, Natalie Connors, Hillary Duff with her glossy smile and blonde hair
looks too much as if she had just wandered out of a TV ad for toothpaste, but
Angie Harmon as Cody's CIA contact suggests a more adult and far more
intriguing conception of femininity. In a smaller part, Keith David gives
quite a good performance as the CIA director who is constantly infuriated by
Cody's stunts.
Among the villains, viewers will recognize
Arnold Vosloo (The Mummy) who is quite good as Francois Molay, the
henchman of the chief bad guy, Brinkman (Ian McShane). Molay has a fetish
about his hair which serves as a source of some gags in Agent Cody Banks.
Here, and at some other points, the film teeters on the edge of falling into
the abyss of camp. Fortunately it draws back and sticks to its better
intuition of remaining a comic takeoff on action pictures, a task at which it
succeeds reasonably well. Agent Cody Banks
has no memorable moments such as the ones even Spider-Man
and XXX manage to
pull off, but it keeps things going at a snappy pace. The
photography by Dennis Crossan is competent if functional, but Jim Miller has
done an outstanding job as editor.
As a motion picture, Agent Cody Banks is
negligible. But as a cultural document it has some interest. In the heyday of
the James Bond movies in the 1960s, spying was definitely an elitist
profession. Even last summer's XXX still remained faithful to this
convention. Xander Cage (Vin Diesel) is a bad boy, but no ordinary street
punk, and he has to survive a brutal training program at the beginning of the
film to prove his stuff. Now in Agent
Cody Banks, espionage turns out to be a fun
pastime for teens like surfing or snowboarding. Any cyber-hip young
dude with a computer at home can just log on to a Web site and start helping
to save Western Civilization.
Production
data courtesy of The Internet Movie Database
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E-mail Dave:
daveclayton@worldnet.att.net