Glenn Powell and Selena Gomez both make their acting debuts in this crazy sci-fi film

Selena Gomez has been acting since childhoodappearing on Barney & Friends, but soared to teen stardom with her recurring role on Disney Channel’s Wizards of Waverly Place. She also has a well-known pop career, which she started in 2009 with her album “Kiss & Tell” when she was only 17. Not only has her music won several awards, but she has continued to work as an actress, scoring several nominations for “Emmy” for her work on the popular show “Only Murder in the Building”.

Meanwhile, Glenn Powell has quickly become one of Hollywood’s most charming leading men, most recently starring in the decent Twisters, the huge hit Anyone But You, the even bigger hit Top Gun: Maverick, and the impressive comedy/thriller Hit Man. Powell came to public attention in Richard Linklater’s 2016 sports film Everybody Wants Some!!, but has worked professionally since his youth, appearing on numerous high-profile television shows.

It turns out that Powell and Gomez share a name in their early filmographies. When Gomez was just 11 and Powell was 15, they both starred — in very small roles — in Robert Rodriguez’s 2003 cyber thriller Spy Kids 3D: Game Over , perhaps the weirdest film in a very weird, and weirdly persistent, franchise the movie. Gomez played a girl at a water park who has a brief conversation with Junie (Daryl Sabaro), the film’s main character. Later in the film, Powell plays a video game player who gets caught up in a VR world. Gomez is called “the girl from the water park.” Powell is called “the boy with the long fingers.”

The premise of Robert Rodriguez’s Spy Kids movies is simple but compelling. The series begins with a pair of young siblings (Sabar and Alex Vega) who learn that their parents (Antonio Banderas and Carlo Gugino) are top-secret superspies. When their parents are kidnapped, the kids have to don their parents’ super-cute high-tech spy gear and fly to the rescue. Spy Kids is a cartoon that is upbeat and fun and was a huge hit in 2001. It spawned a sequel in 2002, and a third film, Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over, was released in 2003.

Game Over was the weirdest movie ever made up to that point. It took place mostly in the virtual world of a high-tech video game where Alex Vega’s character was held captive by three evil scientists, all subconscious iterations of the Toymaker, the villain played by Sylvester Stallone. Juni had to enter a simulation and win a series of increasingly difficult video games to save her sister from harm. In the simulation, Juni is constantly mistaken for a mythical gamer named The Guy, who is said to be skilled enough to beat a mythical level 5.

The film brings back Banderas and Cujino, but also has cameos from Steve Buscemi, George Clooney, Elijah Wood, Mike Judge, Chicha Marino, Danny Trejo, Tony Shalub and Alan Cummings. It was also Ricardo Montalbano’s last screen rolewho played Yuni’s grandfather. In the real world, Montalban is in a wheelchair, but in the video game world, he has a powerful robot body. VR simulations are also all in 3-D. Unfortunately, the 3-D effects were terrible, and it was not used with the gray polarized lenses of most 3-D films, but with old-fashioned red-blue anaglyph 3-D.

Also, the CGI was clunky and bad. Spy Kids 3-D cost $37 million, and presumably all of that went to talent; its visual effects are clearly cheap.

Glenn Powell’s role is very small. He appears only to announce some exposition. He tells Juni that he has arrived at the Arena of Misfortune and that he needs to fight the mech to get to level 2. Powell, even as a teenager, has the charisma of a game show host, telling Juni to “go out there and fight” with a smile on his face. At the end of the fight scene, Mecha Powell returns briefly to catapult Juni to Level 2.

Gomez’s role is a bit more surreal. In the first parts of the film, Juni has already retired from spying and is now working as a child detective. It presents itself in a film noir-style narrative, complete with a breathy saxophone on the soundtrack. He arrived at the water park to investigate the crime, specifically to find all the missing water. He approaches a mysterious girl in a winter coat and informs her that he has solved her case. The girl is Selena Gomez, who looks like an 11-year-old version of the Russian femme fatale. Juni seems to be saying that “they” just turned off all the water slides in the winter. “Who are ‘they’?” she asks. “People who indeed own this place,” says Juni mysteriously. “Oh,” says Gomez. Then she drops out of the movie.

Not very favorable roles, but enough to keep both young people at work. Also, the Spy Kids movies were a big deal in the 2000s, so it’s likely that they were both cast in their roles over many other young actors.

Spy Kids 3-D didn’t get very good reviews, but it made $197 million at the box office, so everyone left with money in their pockets. The last Spy Kids movie was released in 2023.