Principal Cast Antonio Banderas -- Gregorio Cortez Carla Gugino -- Ingrid Cortez Alexa Vega -- Carmen Cortez Daryl Sabara -- Juni Cortez Ricardo Montalban -- Grandfather Holland Taylor -- Grandmother Sylvester Stallone -- Toymaker Mike Judge -- Donnagon Giggles Salma Hayek -- Cesca Giggles Matthew O'Leary -- Gary Giggles Emily Osment -- Gerti Giggles Ratings Ratings are based on Rick's four star system. One star - the commercials are more entertaining than the viewing. Two stars - watch if you have nothing better to do. Three stars - good solid entertainment. Four stars - you never dreamed viewing could be this good.

It's boring, but worse than boring, it's preachy in a way only kid movies can be preachy. This film, with its stiff, cheap, red and green cardboard 3-D glasses, causes the viewer actual physical pain. Even the credit cookies are dull.

I've always had a fondness for 3-D. I collected View Master reels and 3-D comic books. The first 3-D films were before my time -- short subjects using the red and green 3-D process, but I saw the first Polaroid 3-D movie, Bwana Devil, in theaters.

The 3-D craze was over almost as soon as it began. Hitchcock's Dial M For Murder was filmed in 3-D but never shown that way in theaters. You can see a little of it in 3-D at the Universal Studios theme park in Florida.

For the past five decades, every decade has seen one or two movies made in 3-D, and people go to them for the novelty, but nobody wastes a good script or good actors on a 3-D movie, and so there has never been a 3-D movie worth watching.

A few years ago, the great Silver Age comic book artist Neal Adams invented a 3-D process for comic books that allowed the first full color 3-D comic books, but even that gimmick did not catch on. A similar process is used in Spy Kids 3D: Game Over, where a red and green nimbus surrounding color images fools the eye into seeing depth. Surprisingly, this really does produce a 3-D effect. Too bad the movie is so bad. 3-D glasses do not have to be painful to wear. All it takes to make them comfortable is a softer cardboard.

If you want to see a 3-D movie, or take your kids to one, try IMAX. The stories are just as boring, but the 3-D effects are much more spectacular.

Rick Norwood is a mathematician and writer whose small press publishing house, Manuscript Press, has published books by Hal Clement, R.A. Lafferty, and Hal Foster. He is also the editor of Comics Revue Monthly, which publishes such classic comic strips as Flash Gordon, Sky Masters, Modesty Blaise, Tarzan, Odd Bodkins, Casey Ruggles, The Phantom, Gasoline Alley, Krazy Kat, Alley Oop, Little Orphan Annie, Barnaby, Buz Sawyer, and Steve Canyon.