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Spy Kids 2 (U) <br></br>The Sum of All Fears (12) <br></br>Christie Malry's Own Double-Entry (18) <br></br>Rififi (12)

Anthony Quinn
Friday 16 August 2002 00:00 BST
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After Spy Kids blew the box-office roof sky-high, a sequel was bound to follow sooner rather than later, and Spy Kids 2 will doubtless keep fans happy. Once again, the stout Cortez siblings, Carmen (Alexa Vega) and Juni (Daryl Sabara) prove that kids can be super-agents, too, this time setting off on a mission to a volcanic island in order to recover a "Transmooker Device", a frisbee-shaped thing that can shut down all electricity on earth, and therefore a target for a world-dominating megalomaniac who is not as funny as Dr Evil. The joke here is that technology has become so sophisticated that a wristwatch, say, will do everything but tell the time, while gadget-obsessed kids feel outraged when electricity gives out and they have to do everything by hand – "That's so low-tech!" as one of them whines.

Parts of this adventure fantasy are mildly amusing, and the inter-generational rivalry is now expanded from the Cortez parents (Antonio Banderas and Carla Gugino) to the grandparents, a couple of oldsters who bitch about the son-in-law and do the back-seat driving even in a rocket ship. Later, the Cortez kids stumble on the Transmooker – but how do they recognise it? "'Cos it's big and weird and in the middle of the room," says Carmen. Well, she has a point. This sort of genre in-joke and the tongue-in-cheek playing of Banderas and co will make the film a success, but I found much of it synthetic and derivative; whenever narrative pressure drops, the director Robert Rodriguez always takes the easy option of blitzing the screen with special effects, rather than picking up his pen and working on the script. Like his junior heroes, he tends to rely on what comes from the lab to help himself out of a corner.

In the new Tom Clancy-based thriller The Sum of All Fears, the Cold War is suddenly a hot potato again, and America summons its favourite cool-head-in-a-crisis, Jack Ryan. But hang on a minute, that's not Harrison Ford striding along the corridors of power like he did in Patriot Games and Clear and Present Danger. There's no Anne Archer as his wife, either, whom he once bravely rescued from a fate worse than Sean Bean. Did they think we'd just forget? Apparently they did, because it's Ben Affleck playing Jack now, and though still set in the present, he isn't top dog at the CIA anymore but a mere stripling who teaches history. As a personnel change, this doesn't hit me quite so hard as when Pete Duel was suddenly replaced as one half of Alias Smith and Jones in the early Seventies, but it's a tough one to swallow all the same. This new film brings Jack to the hub of power by virtue of an essay he wrote on Nemerov (Ciaran Hinds), a slippery customer who has just acceded to the Russian presidency. For over an hour, the film grinds tediously around the globe – the stuff a Bond film would dispatch before the opening credits – while an old-school Nazi (played by Alan Bates) foments a nuclear escalation between the Pentagon and the Kremlin. Why he does this is unclear, but somehow a plutonium bomb ends up in a Coke dispenser at a Baltimore sports stadium, which should put a fizz in somebody's drink. The Sum of All Fears may answer to an underlying paranoia in the American soul post-11 September, and it does at least point out that the rogue nuke was assembled in the US – crows coming home to roost once again. As an entertainment, though, it's woefully sluggish and portentous, and as for Affleck, an actor who seems to get less amiable by the picture, the verdict is unavoidable: you, sir, are no Jack Ryan.

After a long wait for a distributor, Christie Malry's Own Double-Entry finally gets a release, albeit so limited that it is unlikely to reach the youth market that could make it a success. Which is a shame, because this sump-black comedy is a one-off, an antic, amoral portrait of psychopathic fantasy that might be the Billy Liar of its generation. Based on the cult novel by B S Johnson, it tells the story of a nerdish young man (Nick Moran, in flat-toned mockney mode) who discovers the joys of the double-entry accounting system and translates its credits and debits into a one-man terror campaign against society, starting with small acts of vandalism before graduating to bombs and poisoned reservoirs. You'll never make fun of an accountant again. In between, a subplot recounts the invention of the double entry by a monk during the Italian Renaissance. While there's no faulting the director Paul Tickell for ambition, this manic, scattergun farce occasionally strays into incoherence, and one wonders if some judicious cutting might not have enhanced its prospects among the distributors. Then again, this isn't a film made with compromise in mind, and its rough edges are perhaps inseparable from its appeal. Try it, if you can find it.

Hats off to the director Jules Dassin, still going strong at 90, and to the new print of his marvellous heist thriller Rififi (1955). There is so much to enjoy here, be it the poker-faced cool of Jean Servais as the gang leader, the smoky black-and-white photography of Fifties Paris (those cars, those streets...), or the atmosphere of underworld fatalism that leaks into the picture like poison gas. The film's centrepiece, and still a benchmark of the genre, is the tense, wordless half-hour it takes the quartet of thieves to crack the safe in a jewellery store basement: the patient detail of brace and drill and rock-oil feels absolutely on the money, and the pleasure of watching professionals at work is exhilarating. Their haul turns out to be "the biggest take since the Sabine women", a remark that encapsulates the film's pulpy, smart and seductively unpleasant tone. What are you waiting for?

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