Parents beware: 'Agent Cody Banks' is not 'Spy Kids'

By Marshall Fine
The (Westchester, N.Y.) Journal News

AGENT CODY BANKS (Rated PG) Stars: It's James Bond for kids, except this teenage spy is a mess with girls and stuck in a plot that's just plain silly. Starring Frankie Muniz, Hilary Duff, Angie Harmon, Keith David. Directed by Harald Zwart. MGM, 96 minutes.

But the "Spy Kids" movies of Robert Rodriguez have a rude wit that suffuses their cartoony fantasy world. "Cody Banks" tries to blend comedy, teen attitude and James Bond cool — and falls short on all counts.

Frankie Muniz ("Malcolm in the Middle") plays Cody Banks, a Seattle teen secretly trained at summer camp to be a junior CIA operative. He is called into service when the CIA discovers that a reclusive scientist is about to turn over dangerous technology to an even more dangerous foreign crackpot.

It's up to Cody to get information on the scientist by wooing his daughter. One catch: Cody might be a martial-arts and weapons whiz, but he's totally tongue-tied when it comes to women.

There's humor to be found in the various set-ups that the squad of writers came up with here. And they've done an admirable job of casting, including Angie Harmon as Cody's gorgeous but no-nonsense handler and Keith David as the bombastic CIA chief. But the writing and the direction make "Cody Banks" look like something made for TV, perhaps for Nickelodeon.

Muniz is a capable young actor with strong comic instincts, but he's only as good as his material, which is mediocre in this case. The same is true of Hilary Duff, who plays his love interest. Harmon finds more laughs than you'd expect, while Ian McShane and Arnold Vosloo, as the villains find far fewer.

"Agent Cody Banks" should amuse the 10-to-12-year-old audience. Everyone else probably already has been issued their license to resist its attractions.

Rated PG (profanity, gross-out humor, cartoonish violence).