We Can Be Heroes movie review (2020) | Roger Ebert

On the scale of how solemnly movies take the extraordinary protectors of the Earth, “We Can Be Heroes” places somewhere between Disney’s “Sky High” and “Marvel’s The Avengers,” but boasts the distinct candy-colored futurism of Rodriguez’s PG-rated oeuvre. Rodriguez pokes fun at the trite tropes and delivers on the action (often also lacing the fights with humor), but always with an earnest message on how adults, set in their stubborn ways, don’t always know best.

Deceivingly, Rodriguez opens with Miracle Guy (Boyd Holbrook), your standard Superman-inspired character, and other grown up heroes confronting an armada of tentacled aliens with bad intentions. The crisis forces Marcus Moreno (Pedro Pascal)—think Hawkeye of The Avengers—to break the promise he made to his daughter Missy (YaYa Gosselin) of never fighting in the field again. Outnumbered, the diverse group of demigods is captured. Infighting didn’t help their cause. But this is not their story.

Fearing that the slippery invaders may go after them, the government hides the superheroes’ kids in a bunker. Astute but without any powers, Missy feels out of place among the gifted bunch, all with knowingly on-the-nose-names related to what they can do: Wheels (Andy Walken), a tech-savvy boy in a wheelchair; A Capella (Lotus Blossom), a girl whose singing voice can levitate objects; Ojo (Hala Finley), whose name is Spanish for eye and can predict the future through her drawings. Sharkboy and Lavagirl’s daughter Guppy (Vivien Lyra Blair) is a scene-stealer from beginning to end.

Together the brave young minds set out to rescue their parents, saving the world as a byproduct of their efforts. But Rodriguez doesn’t make the plot’s significance about whether or not they will accomplish their mission (we all should know the answer to that); rather it’s what that victory represents. Unlike the later installments in the “Spy Kids” franchise, which lost the fresh magic of the original, “We Can Be Heroes” packs a compelling theme centered on the transfer of power, namely how the next generation is already better prepared to fight the evils that afflict human life than us.