Agent Cody Banks

Year 18, Day 162 - 6/11/26 - Movie #5,343 - FATHER'S DAY FILM #6

BEFORE: I suppose it was inevitable, like once I put both "Big Fat Liar" and this film on my list there was a good chance that I'd find a way to knock them both out in the same week, along with this film's sequel, the next one on the list, of course. But I wanted to save them for when they served some kind of purpose, and I suppose getting me three steps closer to Father's Day and the start of the Doc Block is about the best function I could have hoped for.  This still leaves the "Spy Kids" movies unwatched, of course, I thought last year I might be able to link to them as a lead-in to my October horror movies, but it turned out to not be necessary, based on the horror chain I put together, I guess there was an easier way to get to the start, and/or I just ran out of slots and had to take a shortcut. Anyway, that was last year, who even remembers? I've really got one more chance in 2026 to get to the "Spy Kids" films, maybe between Doc Block and the Shock Block, but I can't even predict that with any certainty right now, I'm just focused on getting through June. 

Frankie Muniz carries over from "Big Fat Liar".

THE PLOT: A government agency trains Cody Banks in covert operations that require younger participants. 

AFTER: Well, sure, this was never going to be as serious as a James Bond film, which aren't even all that serious themselves. You can't really think that the CIA would institute a program where they recruit teenage agents (that should be "teenagents", I know) just in case they needed to somehow infiltrate a high school or get close to the daughter of some famous scientist who might be doing freelance work for America's enemies, right? Yet this is where we find ourselves tonight, at the junction of teen romance and international intrigue. One day you get selected for a special summer camp due to your high grades and superior video-game puzzle solving skills, and the next thing you know, you're a secret junior CIA agent. (again, "CIAgent", I'm aware.)

Really, in tone this fits in somewhere between the James Bond films, which we're meant to take semi-seriously, and the Austin Powers films, which we're not meant to take seriously at all - so sure, this is ridiculous, but maybe not as ridiculous as it could have been, as in not an outright parody of spy movies, we still want to thrill the 10-18 year olds in the audience, but also maybe most of them are in on the joke. The whole last act of this film, which is set in the villain's lair inside a mountain, looks like it could have been filmed on the set of one of the Austin Powers movies, as if it were decorated by Dr. Evil himself or his henchmen. 

When you give a 15-year old kid a pair of X-ray glasses, sure, he's going to use them to look at women in their underwear. That tracks - but the CIA also finds that if they want him to have time to study up on the background of the girl that he needs to get information from, by maybe getting an invitation to her birthday party, then they'll have to send agents to his house to do his chores and also his homework. Well, I guess that's the price you pay for setting up the TeenAgent program. They also find it's hard to convince their own security guards that a 15-year-old needs to be admitted to the headquarters. Cody also gets a bankroll of money and a bunch of other cool gadgets so he can walk on ceilings and use lasers to cut through ropes and hatchway doors.  

I get it, the movie "Mission: Impossible" was a big hit in 1996, and in 2003 we were all dealing with the fallout - we had lady spies in "Salt" and "Atomic Blonde", older spies in "RED", and the franchises with Jason Bourne, Jack Ryan, The A-Team and The Man from U.N.C.L.E. all came along or came back since Tom Cruise did that wire-hanging thing in that first film, and countless others. We even had one film where a spy turned into a pigeon, and still had to complete his mission, but the less said about that film, the better. So we probably wouldn't have the "Cody Banks" movies without Tom Cruise as Ethan Hunt making a billion damn dollars, or any of the thousand other movies glorifying the spy game. 

The MacGuffin here is a bunch of nanobots that can be trained to "eat" anything, their inventor wanted to use them to clean up oil spills, but his financial backer who is also bent on world domination and/or chaos would prefer to re-purpose them to destroy America's nuclear arsenal, I mean, just imagine a world without nuclear weapons, that would be terrible, right?  Wait, would it, though? I mean, as long as they ate up our enemy's missiles, too, we'd have mutual total disarmament and I think maybe that might not be such a bad thing, except we might have more old-fashioned wars where people died in the old-fashioned way. Honestly, there's no way to be sure, but let's assume that the guy who has a mountain-top secret base and wants to disarm only America might have some evil intent. 

The biggest problem that Cody Banks has is that he's shy and self-conscious around girls, and it seems the CIA trained him how to drive a car, how to disarm a bomb and how to fight off 12 attackers as a one-man army, but they forgot to teach him how to flirt. Guys, this is James Bond 101 here, you stop the villain, you disarm the bomb, and you CHARM THE GIRL, even if she used to be the villain's girlfriend, you try not to think about that and you say something mildly (or very) suggestive and then you sleep with her. The pattern WORKS and you don't mess with success, OK? So they try to give him a crash course in the art of seduction, or at least making conversation, and it all goes horribly wrong, because it turns out the CIA is full of weird nerds who don't even know the first thing about romance or even casual conversation. The army guy has bad advice, the tech expert has bad advice, and the "relationship expert" they bring in is even worse. 

Narratively speaking, there's a lost opportunity here - when Cody wasn't getting any good advice from ALL of the different weirdos who work at the CIA about how to talk to girls, this is where a better writer could have brought in some heart, just by having Cody talk to his own dad. Sure, I realize Cody and his parents were kind of VERY different people, he was in the CIA so he kind of grew out of needing them already, but then he DOES need advice at a critical time. A simple conversation here with his father would have gone a long way. It doesn't even matter what the advice is - "Just be yourself" or "Talk to a girl just like she's a normal person, because she is." Anything like that would have worked here and solved a narrative problem and also brightened up the story. 

But really, there's no time because the villain kidnaps the scientist's daughter in order to make him comply with the instructions to program the nanobots a certain way. Cody is off the case because he got too emotionally involved, also he beat up like ten bullies at that birthday party, the villain recognized his martial arts moves and essentially, his cover was blown. He then disobeyed orders and took Natalie out for ice cream to explain, and that's when she got kidnapped. So he takes it upon himself to sneak into CIA headquarters and get the equipment he needs to track down the base and rescue her, but ends up stuck in a tree, thanks to his rocket-powered skateboard. 

His handler, Agent Ronica, finds him, though, and she at least applauds his initiative - they sneak into the secret base together and work on rescuing Natalie before the villain can release his frozen ice-cube nanobots on the world. Well, as James Bond probably said, when in doubt just kill the villain with his own evil device and blow up the base, that should set everything right. Then you run off with the girl and kiss her by a lake just before sunset - again, the formula works and if it ain't broke, then don't fix it. 

Directed by Harald Zwart (director of "The Pink Panther 2")

Also starring Hilary Duff (last seen in "Cheaper by the Dozen 2"), Angie Harmon (last seen in "Seraphim Falls"), Keith David (last heard in "Free Birds"), Cynthia Stevenson (last seen in "Jennifer's Body"), Arnold Vosloo (last seen in "Blood Diamond"), Daniel Roebuck (last seen in "The Munsters"), Ian McShane (last seen in "From the World of John Wick: Ballerina"), Darrell Hammond (last seen in "Unfrosted"), Martin Donovan (last seen in "The United States of Leland"), Marc Shelton, Chris Gauthier (last seen in "The Butterfly Effect 2"), Harry Van Gorkum (last seen in "Our Brand Is Crisis"), Connor Widdows (last seen in "Say It Isn't So"), Eliza Norbury (last seen in "Saving Silverman"), Justin Kalvari, Saul Kalvari, Andy Thompson (last seen in "Woman of the Hour"), Andrew Johnston (last seen in "Miracle"), Ben Immanuel (last seen in "A Guy Thing"), Miriam Smith (ditto), Jared Van Snellenberg (ditto), Noel Fisher (ditto), Tseng Chang (ditto), Lisa Calder (ditto), Stephen E. Miller (last seen in "Cousins"), Lorena Gale (ditto), Alexandra Purvis, Chad Krowchuk (last seen in "She's the Man"), Jeffrey Ballard (ditto), Shayn Solberg, Anthony Quao, Dee Jay Jackson (last seen in "Happy Gilmore 2"), Peter New (last seen in "Playdate"), Natalie Sellers, Andrew Francis (last seen in "Frankie & Alice"), Alex Diakun (ditto), Branden Nadon, Jessica Harmon (last seen in "Black Christmas"), Hayley Bouey, Michael Cromien, Dan Zukovic (last seen in "Crank: High Voltage"), Fiona Hogan (last seen in "The Show"), Eric Keenleyside (last seen in "How It Ends"), Scott Swanson (last seen in "3000 Miles to Graceland"), Terence Kelly (last seen in "Walking Tall"), Gary Peterman, Dennis Caughlan, Xantha Radley (last seen in "The Fog" (2005)), Prevail, A.C. Peterson (last seen in "Shooter"), Moneca Delain (last seen in "Trick 'r Treat"), Sonja Bakker, Ty Olsson (last seen in "Cut Bank"), Forbes Angus (last seen in "Big Eyes"), Gail Worobets,

RATING: 6 out of 10 surveillance vans disguised as cable installers or florists' vehicles