Secret Headquarters

It was a fun kids movie. What I liked is that it's the only movie in its franchise so I had to do absolutely no prep work in sitting down and watching it. I feel like there is always so much I need to be caught up on and to see a single genre movie that is literally the only project in its franchise is kind of a load off. I don't need to do a thorough review for that reason which is also kind of nice.

I like the stuff with the kids and I thought and Charlie and Maya were a cute couple, and I like that Maya seems alarmingly secretly dangerous. And the end with Mr. Kincaid seeing all his son's good stuff at school and being proud of him was nice too.

The villain getting tired in the middle of the final fight and asking for a break to rest was... a new one. To put it mildly. I was thinking the Guard was nuts to not just knock his lights out right then, but I think he figured the guy was going down anyways, and it was funnier to prolong it. Swagger. The Guard has it.

The teacher being on the ball about the power source at the end was a nice surprise, as was Irons being allowed to join the team at the end.

This movie was rated PG and I think it's one of the first PG movies I've seen in a long time that deserved the rating. I think a lot of movies that deserve to be rated PG are rated PG-13 and a lot of movies that SHOULD be rated G are rated PG, all because the MPAA is unfathomably corrupt and basically one rung above an actual criminal organization. This movie had the villain kill a guy and had some mild language. The proper rating for that is freaking PG. It's a rare modern movie I've seen that gets the correct rating. Every other movie seems to game and the scam the system to pad their box office. Maybe they could afford honesty there because it went straight to streaming. That's probably it.

My biggest beef with the movie was the embarrassing amount of product placement. I get the dynamics of advertising have changed, especially on streaming services with ad-free tiers (of which I subscribe to on Paramount+). But it was starting to get to ridiculous.

But it was a fun little movie. ***1/2.