Movie Review:

Cody Banks 2: Destination London

by Lynn B.

He was just a kid on a skateboard until the CIA saw his James Bond potential. Now, Cody Banks has a new “handler”(out with hot Angie Harmon, in with funnyman Anthony Anderson) and he’s off to save the world starting with London.

Cody Banks (Frankie Muniz) is still an agent for the C.I.A. and his family thinks he is at summer camp; actually a spy training facility. A special ops group pulls a raid on the camp to grab a rogue agent named Diaz (Keith Allen) who is going to sell a mind-control device to the highest bidder. Cody, thinking the operation is just another camp exercise, lets the bad guy go and now he is assigned to go to London to stop him.

Posing as a music prodigy on clarinet (which he can’t play), Cody is off to a London music boarding school with other music whiz kids. The head of the school (James Faulkner) is expected to buy the mind control device. Gone is hottie Angie Harmon and Cody is paired with new handler Anthony Anderson who is made to handle the kid agent as punishment for other operations he messed up. The duo learns that Diaz and his pals will control world leaders with the device and have to team up with a Brit agent to stop the takeover.

The problem with this film is that we lose the “hey, I’m just a kid and I get to play James Bond” angle. Frankie acts very adult in the film and we lose that sense of wonder he had in Cody one. Anthony Anderson is funny enough but much of the rest of the film’s dialogue seems forced and Frankie seems bored mouthing his. Stunts are more limited than in the first film since this one didn’t have as big a budget and had to be shot really fast while Frankie was on a break from his “Malcolm” t.v. show. Cute Hannah Spearritt from the Brit pop group S Club barely has anything to do and has little to no relationship with Frankie’s character. No chance for mini-romance here.

Is it just me, or are bodily-function jokes just getting so been-there-done-that? Instead of building upon the last film, this sequel takes a lot of steps back and doesn’t develop anything established in the first film. If you are a big Cody fan, then you might enjoy it. If not, there isn’t too much here that you haven’t seen done better.

This film is rated PG

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