Facing new adventures in a wild amusement park and on an exotic island, Carmen and Juni Cortez return with gadgets galore in Spy Kids 2: The Island of Lost Dreams. I found this intrepid sister and brother team more fun to watch in their second adventure than in the original Spy Kids. Played again by Alexa Vega and Daryl Sabara, they connect better as siblings now, and their improved rapport helped me suspend disbelief while whimsical creatures and fantastic technology filled the screen.

When the sequel opens, Carmen and Juni have reached a Level 2 spy status – which means they can even give orders to the U.S. president. However, no one has much success ordering Alexandra (Taylor Momsen), the president’s daughter, around. After stealing a gizmo powerful enough to turn off electricity throughout our planet, she stages a protest in the world’s most amazing theme park. Why? Like most kids, she wants attention from her father. Carmen and Juni, summoned to take care of this situation, find themselves in competition with another Spy Kids brother/sister team – Gary and Gertie Giggles (Matthew O’Leary and Emily Osment). Unfortunately, the powerful gizmo slips through their fingers. The rest of the movie deals with their efforts to recover this deadly invention.

Journeying to a mysterious island, Carmen and Juni discover Romero (Steve Buscemi), a genetic scientist responsible for cloning huge, incredible creatures as a result of an experiment gone wrong. And here’s where I felt like a kid again myself, staring in awe at the weird menagerie Romero created – a bull’s head on a frog’s body, a centaur with an ape’s torso atop crab legs, a flying pig, a snake/lizard combination he calls a "slizard," and so on.

Kudos to writer/director Robert Rodriguez and the crew involved with special effects, production design, make-up, and cinematography for those awesome island sequences. These artists are like movie magicians to me. Their imaginative work rekindled my memory of visually exciting creature fantasies from days of yore -- such as 7th Voyage of Sinbad and Clash of the Titans, two of the great Ray Harryhausen’s gems.

With last-minute assistance from their parents (Antonio Banderas and Carla Gugino) and grandparents (Ricardo Montelban and Holland Taylor), our favorite spy kids save the world once more. Although Banderas doesn’t receive enough screen time (for me, there’s never enough where he’s concerned), he’s both dashing and funny in every one of his scenes. Looking at Juni while helping him get ready for an elegant black-tie affair, Banderas projects a "proud papa" attitude mixed with insecurity over how technology, in the form of a bug-like robot, might be more helpful to his son than he could ever be. I was amused at how quickly this fine actor conveyed the father’s conflicted emotions without much dialogue. What an expressive face! Too bad Banderas and Gugino don’t have enough camera time to display that delicious chemistry Gregorio and Ingrid had together in the first Spy Kids movie.

Cameos by Bill Paxton, Cheech Marin, Tony Shalhoub, and Alan Cumming add to the fun, and Mike Judge makes a villain who’s easy to dislike. He’s Gregorio’s unscrupulous rival for a top spy agency job. But it’s the remarkable creatures and gadgets that steal this show. Here’s hoping they don’t overshadow the movie’s humanistic message about family being more important than technology. PLEASE NOTE: Be sure to stay for the clever out-takes. There’s singing and dancing!

(Released by Dimension Films and rated "PG" for action sequences and some brief rude humor.)