We can be heroes
Director – Robert Rodriguez
Fused – Priyanka Chopra, Pedro Pascal, Haley Reinhart, YaYa Gosselin, Boyd Holbrook, Sung Kang, Taylor Dooley, Christian Slater
With virtually nothing for people who actually pay for Netflix subscriptions, We Can Be Heroes is the kind of children’s movie that is practically inaccessible to anyone over the age of 13.
Directed by Robert Rodriguez, who has, to say the least, one of the strangest filmographies of all time, it seems the culmination of a creative experiment that the filmmaker has been carrying out for decades. We Can Be Heroes is a stealthy sequel to the 2005 Rodriguez film, The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl in 3-D, but the cat came out of the bag before the film’s release – probably because the target audience for this film was not alive when Sharkboy and Lavagirl were venturing out (in 3-D!).
Watch the We Can Be Heroes trailer here
Tying We Can Be Heroes to his old film, albeit vaguely, is perhaps Rodriguez’s only attempt to attract adults – besides, of course, a subplot involving a president who can’t string together a sentence because he’s so dumb.
Priyanka Chopra claims to be Ms. Granada, who is essentially a manifestation of corporate America’s power. She is the evil CEO of Heroics, a team of superheroes kidnapped by aliens with tentacles in the first scenes of the film. With the planet under attack and his parents in danger, he falls on his children, led by Missy Moreno (YaYa Gosselin) to rescue them from the aliens and save the world.
Priyanka set the tone for her performance – We Can Be Heroes is a silly film, in which everyone is operating on cartoon frequency – but I wish she had chosen an accent and clung to it. Is Ms. Granada supposed to be Hispanic? So why does she sound like a SoBo girl who spent a semester abroad?
Pedro Pascal in We Can Be Heroes still. (Ryan Green / NETFLIX © 2020)
Although adults have very limited screen time, Priyanka plays a central role in the film. In fact, poor Pedro Pascal and Boyd Holbrook seem to have won big. I wouldn’t be surprised if you told me that they finished shooting all of your scenes in a few days.
Hell, I wouldn’t be surprised if you told me that Rodriguez finished shooting the entire movie in a week. It has the kind of DIY aesthetic that was cute (and even a little admirable) at the time the filmmaker was a Rebel Without a Crew, but he was free of restrictions like limited budgets and a lack of studio support years ago. He no longer needs to do all the work on the film – as usual, Rodriguez is credited here as a director, writer, producer, editor and cameraman – but this may be the only way he knows how to make films.
Well, that is unfortunate. Because just a few weeks ago, he directed one of the best episodes of The Mandalorian. And we all saw how nice your Alita: Battle Angel was last year. It works best in conventional configurations.
Just because a film is made for children does not mean that it has to be youthful. In his final moments, We Can Be Heroes tries to have his cake and eat it – but it’s too late. It ends with a warm message and the promise of a continuation. It is worrying that Rodriguez does not have the best record with this.
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The tweeting author @RohanNaahar