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What it's about:
In this Afrikaans-language adventure film, secret superhero Agent 2000, otherwise known as teenager Walter du Toit, is running short on time. He needs to unmask the school bully AKA the Executioner before the end of the school year's hazing period.
Should he fail, the school's principal will be fired, his reputation as a secret agent will be gone, and he will lose both his best friend and the girl of his dreams.
Will he outwit The Executioner in time, or will agent 2000 be The Executioner's ultimate victim?
What we thought:
Always optimistic about local Afrikaans movie productions, I was hoping for another funny-children’s-movie-with-a-message like its predecessor, Hoofmeisie. Despite having the same production company and returning talent, Agent 2000 ended up being a drawn out, cringing watered-down version of Spy Kids. Without the cool effects.
Somewhere between the directing, plot, acting and laughable fight scenes, it lost its 11 to 14 year old Afrikaner target audience completely. My sister falls in this group, and I am pretty sure she and her friends will probably just shake their heads at this as they turn to their Hunger Games and vampire-genres.
The biggest misstep in this disaster would also be the casting of the lead kid-spy Walter du Toit, played by Roepman-star Paul Loots. It felt like he was super uncomfortable in every situation, to a degree where you started feeling uncomfortable for him and he seemed to have the same Kristen Stewart emotion for all occasions. He was much more suited as the best friend in the KykNet series Thomas@ than a cooler-than-you spy pretending to be a school nerd.
But it can’t all be blamed on the kid. The script itself was riddled with ridiculous hole after another and you could spot who the prankster Laksman was from the beginning. They tried to hide his identity from the audience as long as they could, but it wasn’t fooling anyone. Also, the prankster suddenly took a very dark turn near the end, putting lives in danger to prove a point. For a children’s movie as light as this one, they should rather have just stuck with that tone instead of trying to be deeper than the shallow plot.
Instead of recycling Hollywood gimmicks, this movie should have grown deeper Afrikaner roots which would make it more appealing to a local audience. Hoofmeisie touched an important aspect of schools in SA as the competition for head girl or boy was never void of fierce battle for most kids. I could have gone along with the whole kid-secret-agent thing if it wasn’t so Americanised.
As its name implies, Agent 2000 looks like something that comes out of the early millennium years, which is where it should have stayed. Much younger kids might enjoy the cheese of it all, but anyone that has already hit the teen-digits will make a heavy face-palm at whoever thought this was a good idea.
In this Afrikaans-language adventure film, secret superhero Agent 2000, otherwise known as teenager Walter du Toit, is running short on time. He needs to unmask the school bully AKA the Executioner before the end of the school year's hazing period.
Should he fail, the school's principal will be fired, his reputation as a secret agent will be gone, and he will lose both his best friend and the girl of his dreams.
Will he outwit The Executioner in time, or will agent 2000 be The Executioner's ultimate victim?
What we thought:
Always optimistic about local Afrikaans movie productions, I was hoping for another funny-children’s-movie-with-a-message like its predecessor, Hoofmeisie. Despite having the same production company and returning talent, Agent 2000 ended up being a drawn out, cringing watered-down version of Spy Kids. Without the cool effects.
Somewhere between the directing, plot, acting and laughable fight scenes, it lost its 11 to 14 year old Afrikaner target audience completely. My sister falls in this group, and I am pretty sure she and her friends will probably just shake their heads at this as they turn to their Hunger Games and vampire-genres.
The biggest misstep in this disaster would also be the casting of the lead kid-spy Walter du Toit, played by Roepman-star Paul Loots. It felt like he was super uncomfortable in every situation, to a degree where you started feeling uncomfortable for him and he seemed to have the same Kristen Stewart emotion for all occasions. He was much more suited as the best friend in the KykNet series Thomas@ than a cooler-than-you spy pretending to be a school nerd.
But it can’t all be blamed on the kid. The script itself was riddled with ridiculous hole after another and you could spot who the prankster Laksman was from the beginning. They tried to hide his identity from the audience as long as they could, but it wasn’t fooling anyone. Also, the prankster suddenly took a very dark turn near the end, putting lives in danger to prove a point. For a children’s movie as light as this one, they should rather have just stuck with that tone instead of trying to be deeper than the shallow plot.
Instead of recycling Hollywood gimmicks, this movie should have grown deeper Afrikaner roots which would make it more appealing to a local audience. Hoofmeisie touched an important aspect of schools in SA as the competition for head girl or boy was never void of fierce battle for most kids. I could have gone along with the whole kid-secret-agent thing if it wasn’t so Americanised.
As its name implies, Agent 2000 looks like something that comes out of the early millennium years, which is where it should have stayed. Much younger kids might enjoy the cheese of it all, but anyone that has already hit the teen-digits will make a heavy face-palm at whoever thought this was a good idea.
