When The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl was released in 2005, filmmaker Robert Rodriguez’s son Racer Max was seven years old, and so it was forgivable that his creations (he was credited with the movie’s story) were childish and inane. Still, the elder Rodriguez’s inept, annoying execution of that story was less forgivable. However, no one can be forgiven for the new quasi-sequel We Can Be Heroes, written and directed (and shot and edited) by Robert Rodriguez, with Racer Max credited as producer, and Rodriguez’s other four children involved in various production capacities.

It’s endearing that Rodriguez loves his children so much that he wants to mount these family filmmaking projects, produced largely at his own studios in Austin, Texas. He’s lucky to be famous enough to get Netflix to put up a budget for the equivalent of a crayon drawing to hang on the family refrigerator. But that doesn’t mean that anyone outside the Rodriguez family needs to actually watch these movies, which are garish, hyperactive and incoherent, looking like they were cobbled together in a weekend with whatever celebrity pals Rodriguez could convince to participate.

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We Can Be Heroes is at least somewhat less abrasive than The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl, and it isn’t so much a sequel as a new standalone kid-focused superhero story in which Sharkboy and Lavagirl make brief appearances. Although those two superheroes (played in the original movie by Taylor Lautner and Taylor Dooley) were first presented as figments of a kid’s imagination, in We Can Be Heroes they seem to be completely real, just two of the many heroes who make up the superhero team known as the Heroics.

With dopey names like Miracle Guy (Boyd Holbrook), Blinding Fast (Sung Kang) and Tech-No (Christian Slater), the members of the Heroics sound like they were created in a 10-minute brainstorming session, and they have personalities to match. The movie is really about their kids, though, led by Missy Moreno (YaYa Gosselin), daughter of semi-retired Heroics team leader Marcus Moreno (Pedro Pascal), who wields telepathic swords but for some reason has no dumb-sounding superhero name like Sword Dude.

Missy has convinced her dad to take a desk job following the death of her mother, but when an alien armada invades Earth, Marcus is called up along with all of the other Heroics to save the planet. Ms. Granada (Priyanka Chopra Jonas), the head of the Heroics project, rounds up Missy and the children of the other Heroics and places them in a secure facility so they’re safe from the aliens. But when all of the adult heroes are captured, Missy must lead her fellow superhero spawn on a rescue mission, while avoiding adult detection.

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Unlike the other superhero children, Missy possesses no powers of her own, which makes her feel insecure. So of course she has to learn some lessons about believing in herself, while the squabbling superpowered heroes (both children and adults) have to learn about teamwork. These themes are presented in the most obvious, rudimentary way, barely above the level of a preschool storybook, without any cleverness or creativity. We Can Be Heroes is aimed at kids, and it doesn’t need to be overly complex, but it should feel like at least a modicum of thought went into the plotting and the dialogue and the character development.

Like the adult heroes, the superpowered kids all have basic names that go with their basic powers (Noodles is stretchy, Wheels has a souped-up wheelchair, Rewind and Fast-Forward make time move backward or forward, Facemaker … makes faces), along with equally one-dimensional personalities. As the lead, Gosselin has an appealingly upbeat presence even when Missy is faced with self-doubt, but the movie is full of Disney Channel-style overstated child acting, and none of the emotional beats carry any resonance. The semi-famous faces dutifully trudge through their adult roles, although Jonas at least seems to be having fun as the rules-obsessed caretaker tracking the children down.

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Like The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl and most of Rodriguez’s kid-focused films, We Can Be Heroes has the visual aesthetic of a ’90s Nickelodeon tie-in toy, and the alien spaceship where most of the movie’s second half takes place (designed, of course, by Rodriguez’s son Rogue) is a horrific purple eyesore that is almost literally painful to look at. The special effects are chintzy and unconvincing, and the costumes look flimsy. The only Rodriguez who does a halfway decent job here is Rebel, whose musical score is entirely inoffensive.

Fans of Sharkboy and Lavagirl, if such people exist, will be disappointed that the returning characters are almost completely superfluous, with former child actor Dooley coming out of retirement to deliver a handful of lines, and Lautner not even bothering to show up (he’s replaced as Sharkboy by the film’s stunt coordinator, JJ Dashnaw, who never speaks). Their daughter Guppy (Vivien Blair) is the youngest kid on the junior superhero team, with powers that involve “shark strength” and manipulating water, and she’s the movie’s go-to source for cutesy “ain’t I a stinker?” moments.

For all its exhausting, chaotic nonsense, We Can Be Heroes boils down to a simplistic, anticlimactic lesson that renders most of the narrative stakes irrelevant. There’s no genuine feeling of peril or uncertainty, and the heroes are never faced with any meaningful sacrifices. This sanitized idiocy makes Secret Society of Second-Born Royals look like The Avengers. At least the Rodriguez family had fun, though.

Starring YaYa Gosselin, Lyon Daniels, Andy Walken, Hala Finley, Lotus Blossom, Dylan Henry Lau, Andrew Diaz, Isaiah Russell-Bailey, Akira Akbar, Nathan Blair, Vivien Blair, Priyanka Chopra Jonas and Pedro Pascal, We Can Be Heroes is now streaming on Netflix.

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