Secret Headquarters (2022) – Movie Review

August 13, 2022

Secret Headquarters is a 2022 an adventure movie starring Owen Wilson. It is directed by Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman.

A ‘Spy Kids’-like movie for this summer, which is soon over. The kids deserve their fun.

Synopsis

Charlie Kincaid invites his friends over to hang out after school while his father is away on a business trip. They discover that the basement is the secret headquarters of a superhero.

Of course, we all new about the headquarters, except for Charlie himself (as it is shown in the first sequence).

Review

A movies for preteens with all that implies for the Marketing Department, who has probably been busy compiling market research on what is considered cool amongst the target age group. Add a few effects to ‘The Goonies’, which the older marketing folks probably saw as children, and voila, you have the perfect product.

As expected, it is not precisely Downton Abbey what we are in for here, the movie being full of innocuous and easy humoristic lines and retorts, with a lot of action and a story that has a set of characters that so well lives up to this formula: the really bad baddies, alert and sharp group of friends, and the cool dad.

It has a narrative structure that is “popcorn” and east (not all blockbusters have to have such structure, but this one does) and they provide us exactly with what the producers asked for, well knowing it would work, and that the audience’s parents expect of a movie for their young ones.

Being created with sufficient action and effects to wow the kids, and traditional enough for the grown-ups to feel contented in the belief that nothing has changed since ‘The Goonies‘ was “the thing”.

As a movie, that is not particularly innovative, it manages to be just another product that will neither make history, nor will particularly serve to save Owen Wilson’s career.

Our Opinion

It is a movie from which we know what to expect, and delivers on those expectations. If you analyze it (hopefully, you will not), you will know exactly what producers are there for: to design a product that will ensure relative success, such as this one by using the same formula again and again.

And the star is… Owen Wilson

Owen Cunningham Wilson was born on September 18, 1968 in Dallas, Texas (United)

Owen Cunningham Wilson is an American actor. He has had a long association with filmmaker Wes Anderson with whom he shared writing and acting credits for Bottle Rocket (1996), Rushmore (1998), and The Royal Tenenbaums (2001), the last of which earned him a nomination for the Academy Award and BAFTA Award for Best Screenplay. He has also appeared in Anderson’s The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004), The Darjeeling Limited (2007), The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014), and The French Dispatch (2021). Wilson also starred in the Woody Allen romantic comedy Midnight in Paris (2011) as unsatisfied screenwriter Gil Pender, a role which earned him a Golden Globe Award nomination. In 2014 he appeared in Paul Thomas Anderson‘s Inherent Vice, and Peter Bogdanovich’s She’s Funny That Way. (From Wikipedia)