“It’s classified information. If I tell you, I’ll have to kill you.”
Justin’s rating: The spy world is not meant for the colorful early ’90s
Justin’s review: Even well into the ’90s, Hollywood kept pushing this “kids have a huge secret agent fantasy” narrative that I don’t think was there. At least, not to the extent that movies like The Double O Kid suggest. My memory was that James Bond was pretty played out in youth pop culture — it was something your dad watched, not you — until Goldeneye came along in 1995 to make 007 cool again. For a little while, at least.
“James Bond for teenagers who also like chess and rollerblading and hacking why not” is the angle of this movie, which apparently was created by a committee of adults who had no idea what youth culture was even about. I mean, chess? What focus group approved that?
One thing that’s hard to deny is that this direct-to-video flick has an oddly stacked cast, starting with Corey Haim (Dream a Little Dream). Haim plays Lance, your average teenage boy who both goes to school and interns at some sort of government spy agency. His mother is cool with it. Maybe she shouldn’t be, and maybe she should have a word with Lance about his haircut that looks like Beaker from the Muppets.
Given a routine courier task, Lance ends up roped into some cyber crime intrigue and gets on the wrong side of a bad guy team consisting of evil hacker Wallace Shawn (The Princess Bride) and Brigitte Nielson (Red Sonja). John Rhys-Davies shows up for a few minutes as another bad guy, but he’s killed off in the most confusing arcade game I’ve ever seen, so that’s a pointless cameo. But hey, Shawn is great fun as the villain, so I wasn’t complaining.
Lance does get some help with his discount Bond girl/rollerskating waitress, Nicole Eggert (Amanda and the Alien). Oh, and Seth Green makes a quick appearance to round out our quota of “HE’S in this too?” mentions.
This movie couldn’t push the Bond tropes harder if it tried, what with an off-brand 007 theme playing all the time, weird gadgets popping out of the woodwork, a bad guy named “Cashpot,” and an (arcade) room full of deadly traps.
What’s odd here is that you’d think that The Double O Kid would be angled at younger kids due to the tone and subject matter, but the PG-13 rating brings in straight-up murder, harsh language, and sexual innuendo that hopes to rope in the teens. It was written by Steven Paul as a follow-up for another 007 wannabe he did, Never Too Young to Die, so I think this was his personal fantasy that he couldn’t get going in real life. And then he wrote the Baby Geniuses movie series, so that’s the level of quality we’re looking at here.
The failure to pick a lane and create either a really great movie for kids or for teens fatally hurts The Double O Kid. It wants — it so desperately wants — to be cool, but it never once earns that. I mean, at one point Corey Haim is in a shopping cart being pushed by Eggert like a little kid while he squirts a super soaker at an evil hockey team. The committee of clueless adults thought this was amazing, but the rest of us will echo Eggert’s confused, “What the hell was that all about?”
Intermission!
- A gas-emitting floor waxer? OK…
- Wow, straight-up murder, I was not expecting that
- LOOK AT THOSE AMAZING COMPUTER EFFECTS! THAT ARE USED TO CREATE A WEIRD CHESS BOARD!
- Seriously, these opening credits get stranger the longer they go
- Lady, your son is reading Playboy at breakfast. You might be a terrible mom.
- Is she sitting in a hot tub in a full dress? And with her hair made up?
- The bad guy’s “Fun Room.” It does look fun. The car mannequin? Not so much.
- I do NOT get this evil car arcade game. What is damaging the car? He’s not actually moving.
- Corey Haim gets to make out with whatever woman he wants
- The old Diet Pepsi logo!
- Pillow fight vs a tiny switchblade
- Mustard on the head is a viable fighting move
- A billboard for Batman Returns. I’d rather be watching that.
- Always pull a tuft of your weird hair through your backwards hat
- Beware of killer hockey teams in parking garages!
- Random lady getting her car trashed by hockey players is kind of funny. And then her car is 100% OK at the end.
- So much super soaker product placement
- Ugh that horrible synth muzak love theme
- Why does Lance dress up as the Joker for the zoo?
- You can die from a pizza stain on your shirt, it appears
- “Somebody cut his thumb off!” I did not see that.
- “ALLIGATORS!” it’s very easy to jump into a completely fake alligator exhibit, I guess
- It’s also easy to shoot and tranq two kids over your shoulder while you’re driving
- The henchman immediately stealing from his boss got a chuckle out of me
- A virus attack is no more than the words “VIRUS ATTACK” on a computer screen
- “Doom Tomb” sounds like a pretty fun game, but it’s only a video of a mummy waving a torch at you