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70As ingenious and lively as the original film.
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63Apart from funny supporting work by the inventor of the Mind Control and the guy in the "Q" role, the movie is pretty routine.
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63With lots of cool gadgets, plenty of silliness and a clever concept guaranteed to appeal to preteens, this should be an unflagging, high-octane romp.
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Muniz is quite winning as a plucky teen who is constantly being thrown into situations over his head. But the usually reliable Anthony Anderson e-mails in his performance as Cody's handler.
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So the movie's OK in spots, but it's mostly so familiar that even the young target audience may get that deja vu feeling.
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50Stretching what was a cute concept to the breaking point.
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50Muniz has better secret-agent toys to play with, funnier lines and sidekicks helping him out, and a bit more discerning director in Kevin Allen ("The Big Tease").
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If you have a low opinion of the first "Cody Banks," and your kids drag you to this one, you may be tempted to do some food-flinging of your own.
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50Try as it might, this glossy action adventure isn't nearly as clever as the "Spy Kids" franchise.
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50Mildly diverting caper.
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Kids should be reasonably diverted for a couple of hours, but odds are they'll have forgotten the whole thing by the next morning.
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At bottom, there's just too much spy in young Cody, and too little kid. The writers might've taken (another) page from the ''Spy Kids'' playbook and infused the action with youth relevance.
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40Muniz has a great face and body for physical comedy, but the numerous one-liners shoehorned into the script fall flat, unassisted by Anderson's numbing “street” ad-libs.
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40Given the great premise and characters inherited from the first film, it's surprising that this sequel fails to match its predecessor's appeal. The humor is silly, broad, and surprisingly generic.
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It's a movie, and certain liberties are bound to be taken, but having Derek stop a moped-driving Brit on the street by pulling out some sort of identification and yelling, "CIA, I need your moped!" is not the way.
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30In terms of inspiration or even the slightest shred of ingenuity, Banks ranks more like an 000 than an 007.
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30Opens with its snazziest effects sequences and gets cheaper from there, as if studio executives were constantly scaling back the budget as the filmmakers went along.
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30Mr. Allen's work is compromised by an apparent inability to match his shots in a spatially coherent fashion. It's never easy to tell who is chasing whom and in which direction, a needless confusion that dampens many of the thrills and scuttles quite a few gags.
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30As hard as the film tries to pander, the kids at the preview screening seemed a bit disengaged.
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25While the canine is a scene stealer, the movie is a dog.
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25After 90 minutes of diligently searching the premises of ACB2, no evidence of mass entertainment can be found. Recommend cancellation of all future similar missions.
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20Continuity errors are as numerous as product placements and though shot on location, the movie captures none of London's local color.
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20Everything about Agent Cody Banks 2 reeks of hurry-up and make this movie before its kid star Frankie Munoz loses his pubescent looks (it’s already borderline).
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It's hard to despise a movie with the balls to posit that its Blair-look-alike PM has been brainwashed by a corrupt CIA operative, but Banks 2 is really pretty hateful.
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0Should have been stopped at customs -- as family entertainment, it constitutes child abuse.
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 3 out of 8
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Mixed: 2 out of 8
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Negative: 3 out of 8
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