Plot: While hanging out after school, Charlie and his friends discover the headquarters of the world’s most powerful superhero hidden beneath his home. When villains attack, they must team up to defend the headquarters and save the world.
Review: Since Marvel Studios defined the superhero genre, countless producers have tried to replicate their formula with middling levels of success. The most successful takes have been those that have defied convention and tried to redefine the genre themselves while others have played it safe and tried to mimic the MCU blueprint. Paramount+ action flick Secret Headquarters is a prime example of a project with multiple talents experienced in making comic book movies who fail to capture the energy that makes Marvel Studios such a consistent organization. With some solid special effects and a talented cast of performers, Secret Headquarters cannot help but feel like a cheap imitation rather than something original.
Secret Headquarters follows Charlie Kincaid (Walker Scobell), a 14-year-old fan of the superhero known as The Guard. Living with his mom, Charlie is regularly overlooked by his dad, Jack (Owen Wilson), an IT expert who is constantly rescheduling their time together. One night when his dad is called away, Charlie and his best friend Berger (Keith L. Williams) invite friends Maya (Momona Tamada) and Lizzie (Abby James Witherspoon) to hang out when they inadvertently discover Jack’s secret man-cave which also turns out to be the secret headquarters of The Guard. Taking stock of the countless gadgets in the HQ, the kids have a blast messing around until they show up on the radar of military industrialist Argon (Michael Pena) who wants The Guard’s power source.
The trailer for Secret Headquarters presents the film as something a bit more cohesive than it actually is. Over the film’s 100-minute running time, Owen Wilson is on screen for less than an hour. A third of his overall screen time is relegated to video calls or scenes where he is the only actor before he joins the full cast for the final act of the film. The majority of the movie is spent with the teen actors as they play with the superhero toys before the bad guys show up. Most of the heavy lifting falls on Michael Pena and Jesse Williams as Irons, a soldier who has a personal grudge against The Guard. Along with a squad of mercenaries, the movie at times feels like a mash-up of Spy Kids, Home Alone, Power Rangers, and Iron Man.
Unfortunately, while the story nabs elements of all of those aforementioned movies, it cannot tell if it wants to be a comedy or an action movie. Despite being rated PG, Secret Headquarters has a lot of mild scatological humor and a fair amount of violence wrapped up in a story that tries way too hard to be funny. While Pena and Wilson are clearly able to pull off comedy and drama, this movie fails to make anything of their performances feel natural while Jesse Williams seems to be acting as if he is in a totally different movie that is far darker and more serious. Even Scobell, who was perfectly cast as a younger Ryan Reynolds in The Adam Project, has a few moments of self-deprecating humor in this movie that hints at that other film but never really comes out consistently in this movie.
Based on an original screenplay by Christopher Yost (Thor: Ragnarok, Cowboy Bebop), Secret Headquarters was rewritten by Josh Koenigsberg (High Fidelity) and directors Ariel Schulman and Henry Joost. Schulman and Joost, best known for directing Catfish, Paranormal Activity 3 and 4, as well as Nerve, are an odd choice to helm the family-friendly action movie that this portends to be and are not up to the task of making this movie look or feel very cinematic. Everything about Secret Headquarters feels mediocre outside of the solid score by Lorne Balfe. Even the prominent credit to producer Jerry Bruckheimer feels like it should have been hidden in the marketing as this movie is the least Bruckheimer-esque movie to bear his name. It is worth noting that this movie is the first project for Bruckheimer and Owen Wilson since Armageddon and it is noticeable how much they are both slumming it here.
Secret Headquarters feels like it startest out as a far different project that was watered down into a kid’s movie rather than the true superhero project that it could have been. The title makes the titular base of operations seem more significant than it is and the marketing really misleads the viewer as to what this movie is actually about. Secret Headquarters isn’t funny enough, action-packed enough, or original enough to warrant the level of talent involved in front of the camera or behind it. Owen Wilson has made some bad movies but this one is one of his weakest. This is not a very good movie at all but looks much better than it deserves to.