How crazy has the world of Robert Rodriguez's "Spy Kids" movies become? In Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over, regular-Joe King of the Hill creator Mike Judge is married to Salma Hayek. That should give you a clue.

I don't think I've seen a series of movies evolve so extremely this quickly. In the year 2001, Rodriguez introduced audiences to Spy Kids, a loopy film about a couple of dorky kids who thought their parents were even dorkier until those parents got kidnapped and their secret world was revealed to them. They found out mom and dad were really super-cool spies, complete with super-cool gadgets. Arming themselves with crazy spy equipment, the kids set off to save their parents by infiltrating a madman's wacky hideout, which was populated by giant thumbs, living blobs, and robot children. The whole movie was kind of nuts, but it made sense in a kid's fantasy kind of way, and its energy was joyfully zany. Moreover, the story -- about finding out how cool your family is -- was solid and endearing.

The family message recurred to a lesser degree in 2002's Spy Kids 2: The Island of Lost Dreams, which had a more straightforward stop-the-bad-guy plot. Strengthening the foundation of the series' family theme took a back seat to amping up more hyper special effects and action sequences. This movie felt crazier than the first one, if that was possible, but it also felt less substantive.

Now, with Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over, the series has moved so far away from the feel of the first movie in such a short time (a brisk three years) that it must have broken some kind of record. Although it's nice to know Rodriguez isn't interested in rehashing the first movie, I can't help feeling saddened by the direction he's chosen. Plot and themes have gone completely out the window in favor of more eye-candy. With this third installment, the eye-candy has completely taken center stage -- guess we should have seen this coming, since the movie is called Spy Kids 3-D.

Consequently, this flick lives and dies by how well the audience responds to the 3-D stuff. For me, it wasn't particularly great -- just decent, really. I know a regular 3-D movie in a regular theater isn't going to give viewers the same cool experience as seeing that "Bug's Life" show at Disney's California Adventure, but, just the same, I was hoping for something more memorable. As it is, it's a passable distraction. But what bothered me was how 3-D forces the movie to sacrifice colors from its visuals. Don't mistake me -- the film is in color, but it could have been in so much more color. In the movie, the characters are trapped in a video game world, where vivid colors could have been a tremendous visual asset. Instead, they're obscured by the 3-D glasses for the sake of 3-D effects that merely pass inspection.

But whither the rest of the movie? The plot doesn't make any sense -- at first, it feels like a parody of The Matrix, or maybe even Tron, but after a while the sense of futility in trying to discover some kind of subtext becomes overwhelming. In fact, forget the subtext -- the plot itself is AWOL, having something to do with attempting to find the bad guy, then realizing that finding the bad guy is a bad idea, and then going off to find the bad guy again, or something like that. Meanwhile, the bad guy is Sylvester Stallone playing one person and three alternate versions of himself in what appears to be a hammy one-man rendition of amateur night at the local comedy club.

The family theme remains intact, but barely. For starters, the movie doesn't feature Carmen Cortez (Alexa Vega), one-half of our heroic team, until the last third of the movie. Her little brother Juni (Daryl Sabara) takes the spotlight this time, and the absence of their sibling dynamic is sorely felt. Grandpa (Ricardo Montalban) figures in the plot, but he just drops in and out from time to time to remind us the story will eventually have a moral. Dad and Mom (Antonio Banderas and Carla Gugino, still curiously top-billed) aren't even around until a climactic crisis occurs, when Juni calls them to action. They drop in, as does the rest of everybody who has ever been in the Spy Kids series, from Alan Cumming and Tony Shalhoub to Bill Paxton and Steve Buscemi. After each one of them appears for about, oh, 30 seconds each, they huddle together and extol the value of family by having the screen show each one at a time saying, "Family," as if this were a big toast without the champagne. After about 80 minutes of Saturday-morning-style 3-D action, we find the family theme literally tacked on.

But will kids like it? I honestly couldn't tell you, although, if I had to take a guess, I'd say Spy Kids 3-D contains enough dazzle to keep the younger kids happy. The movie is cheerful and not insulting, innuendo-laden, nor mean-spirited in the least, which is sometimes the best we can hope for in a children's flick. I wish the family theme had been better integrated into the story, like in the first Spy Kids. And I also wish we lived in a world where a regular-Joe marrying Salma Hayek is actually possible. Oh well, we can't have everything.