Review: 'Secret Headquarters' is a bland attempt at making a kid-friendly spy action movie

The kid-targeted action movie “Secret Headquarters” is a bland and uninteresting attempt to meld two oddball ideas — “Spy Kids” and “The Greatest American Hero” — and missing the boat entirely.

The prologue shows a typical family — Jack (Owen Wilson) and Lily (Jessie Mueller) and their 4-year-old son, Charlie (Louie Chaplin Moss) — on a camping trip. Then they witness a military plane collide with a UAP, an “unidentified aerial phenomenon,” or a UFO. Jack drives the family’s VW microbus to the crash site, where he meets the downed pilot, Capt. Sean Irons (Jesse Williams). They then encounter an alien probe, which scans both men, and chooses Jack as “Guardian.”

Flash-forward 10 years. Jack and Lily have divorced, and Charlie, now 14 (and played by Walker Scobell) feels like a neglected son because of all of his dad’s emergency business trips. Charlie instead obsesses over a shadowy superhero known as The Guard, who’s constantly rescuing people and averting crisis situations around the globe. The Guard’s identity is a mystery, one that Ansel Argon (Michael Peña), a billionaire defense contractor, wants desperately to find — having hired Irons to lead the global search for The Guard’s power source.

Charlie visits Jack for his birthday, and is unsurprised when his dad has to leave at the last minute. Charlie takes advantage of the situation, and invites his buddy Berger (Kevin L. Williams) over to play video games, and Berger brings over two girls from their middle-school class: Social-media obsessive Lizzie (Abby James Witherspoon), and recent transfer student Maya (Momona Tamada), on whom Charlie had a crush when they were in fifth grade.

The kids soon discover that Jack’s house has some extra features — namely an elevator that goes to a massive underground lair loaded with tons of alien technology. The other kids figure out what Charlie can’t bring himself to believe: That this is the headquarters of The Guard, and that Jack is The Guard.

The kids start playing with The Guard’s gadgets, which Irons and his team detect. Soon, Irons and Argon’s team of mercenaries are infiltrating the headquarters, and it’s up to the kids to defend The Guard’s secrets.

The directing team of Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman — who made “Catfish,” “Nerve” and “Project Power” — rewrote a much-handled script, and it’s hard to see if they improved on it. What’s on the screen are by-the-numbers fight scenes, a few lame jokes, and predictable heart-to-heart conversations between father and son. Any fan watching this on Paramount+ could, with a few days’ work, write a script of equal quality.

Viewers might recognize Scobell for a similar role — a pre-teen scarred by an absentee dad — in the time-travel Netflix action movie “The Adam Project.” (He was the young version of Ryan Reynolds character.) His chemistry here with Wilson is slightly better than what he had opposite Mark Ruffalo in that movie, but that’s probably attributable to Wilson’s laid-back charms.

The annoying part of “Secret Headquarters” is how Paramount saw it coming. The studio originally set this movie up for a theatrical run, and only in June announced it would debut on its streaming service. Consider it a blessing, that we can ignore “Secret Headquarters” in the privacy of our own homes, rather than blowing money on movie tickets for it.

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‘Secret Headquarters’

★★

Starts streaming Friday, August 12, on Paramount+. Rated PG for violence, action, language and some rude humor. Running time: 104 minutes.