We Can Be Heroes

The Kids Are Alright (And We Are Not)

It takes exactly five minutes of *We Can Be Heroes* to realize you are not watching a Marvel movie. You're watching a Robert Rodriguez fever dream, and depending on your age and tolerance for neon-purple CGI, that's either a threat or a promise. When the film dropped on Netflix in late 2020, I fired it up with a healthy dose of adult cynicism. I expected a nostalgic cash-grab, a spiritual sequel to 2005's *The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl* that would coast on millennial goodwill [8]. What I got instead was a profoundly weird, aggressively candy-colored children's movie that basically looks the camera in the eye and tells anyone over the age of thirty that they've completely ruined the planet.



Rodriguez has always operated on his own frequency. He's an one-man studio who shoots, edits, and directs his own projects, bleeding the line between violent exploitation films and hyper-sincere family entertainment [6]. His signature aesthetic in these kids' movies is something I can only describe as "expensive cheapness." The visual effects here do not strive for photorealism. Instead, the alien spaceships and stretchy limbs possess the rubbery sheen of a PlayStation 2 cutscene [8]. The adult heroes—a Justice League knockoff known as the Heroics, featuring a visibly amused Pedro Pascal and Boyd Holbrook—are dressed in costumes that look like they were purchased at a Halloween pop-up store [6]. Whether that's a flaw or a feature depends entirely on your patience.



But here is the thing: kids do not care about texture rendering. They care about momentum. And Rodriguez understands how a child's imagination actually works. When an armada of tentacled aliens captures the Earth's adult protectors, the government herds their superpowered offspring into an underground bunker [6]. It's here that the film finds its chaotic rhythm. The ensuing escape sequence is a masterclass in playground logic. You have a kid named Noodles who stretches like taffy [1]. You have twins named Rewind and Fast Forward who constantly bicker [1]. There is a boy whose muscles are so strong he requires a wheelchair to support them [1]. When they break out, it's not a slick tactical strike. It's a clumsy, overlapping mess of powers—someone rewinds time a few seconds to prevent a guard from hitting a button, someone else steals a keycard. It feels exactly like kids making up the rules to a game in the backyard as they go along.



Anchoring all this frantic energy is YaYa Gosselin as Missy Moreno [11]. The stroke of genius here is that Missy is the only kid in the room without any superpowers [1]. In a lesser movie, she'd magically discover she could shoot lasers out of her eyes in the third act. But Rodriguez commits to her ordinary status. Gosselin, who was barely eleven years old during filming, plays the role with an earnest, unblinking gravity [11]. She is not trying to be cute. Watch her posture when she's trying to get the others to listen; her shoulders are rigid, her jaw set. She brings a grounded emotional reality to a movie where a girl named Guppy literally summons sharks out of thin air. After a string of minor television roles, Gosselin's performance here proves she can hold the center of a very loud frame [11].

And it's a loud frame that ultimately has a lot on its mind. (I know, I know. It's a movie with a stretchy boy. Bear with me.) Underneath the slapstick and the saturated colors, there is a surprisingly pointed critique of the adults in the room. The grown-up superheroes are depicted as arrogant and prone to infighting, totally incapable of working together to solve an existential threat [6]. It's not hard to see the real-world parallels. As IGN pointed out, "With We Can Be Heroes, Rodriguez is confronting the world he is leaving behind for his kids, and making sure he encourages them to do better than his generation did" [4].

By the time the final twist is revealed—that the entire invasion was essentially a fabricated training exercise to force the kids to step up—the metaphor is complete [5, 8]. The adults are obsolete. They've handed over a broken world and essentially said, "Good luck." I am not entirely sure the movie earns its runtime, and the dialogue occasionally clunks like dropping a wrench in a metal bucket. But there is a stubborn optimism to it that I could not shake. It's a messy, garish, big-hearted reminder that sometimes the best thing the older generation can do is simply get out of the way.