Writer/director Robert Rodriguez (Sin City; Desperado) upped the ante for this sequel to his family adventure surprise hit.

Carmen and Juni Cortez (Alexa Vega and Daryl Sabara) are now old hats at the spy game, but face competition in the form of fellow kid sibling spies Gary and Gerti Giggles (Emily Osment and Matt O'Leary). Seeking to snatch a case out from under their rivals, Carmen and Juni head to the titular island, where a scientist named, er, Romero (played by the great Steve Buscemi) has created a cavalcade of weird and dangerous creatures.

With more money to play with, Spy Kids 2 is a bigger movie than the first one, and features lots of nice special effects and monster action. But in the grand scheme of things, it's still very much a low-budget production - by setting up his own special effects facility and taking care of pretty much every aspect of production himself, Rodriguez makes his dollar stretch further than most big bloated Hollywood productions.

In addition to Bucsemi, the series welcomes new cast members in the form of Ricardo Montalban (Fantasy Island) and Holland Taylor (Two and Half Men) as Carmen and Juni's grandparents (former spies of course) and the wonderful Bill Paxton, having a great time as a Texan theme park entrepreneur. Returning from part one are Antonio Banderas (currently on movie screens in another sequel, The Legend of Zorro) and Carla Gugino (Sin City) as Carmen and Juni's spy parents; Beavis and Butthead creator Mike Judge as the Giggles' dad; even first film villain Alan Cumming gets to cameo.

The Spy Kids series came about when following the success of his violent hits Desperado, The Faculty and From Dusk Till Dawn, Rodriguez decided he wanted to make a movie his kids could enjoy. The film was enough of a hit to warrant this sequel, and a third film was released in 3-D.

Last year, he returned to his more mature filmmaking roots with the absolutely kick-arse adaptation , of the violent and noir-ish comic book Sin City.

Ever the maverick, Rodriguez resigned from the Director's Guild of America so he could co-direct the film with Sin City's writer/artist Frank Miller (the DGA will only allow one director credited on any one picture).

But the move has threatened Rodriguez's next film, a Paramount-backed, $100 million adaptation of Edgar Rice Burroughs' (Tarzan) space epic A Princess of Mars, the first in the John Carter, Warlord of Mars series. Paramount, as a DGA signatory, is only permitted to hire DGA members to direct its films, and was forced to move on to other directors, after failing to convince Rodriguez to re-join the DGA. Plays by his own rules, that guy.

Rodriguez is currently planning a follow-up to Sin City, and is also collaborating with Quentin Tarantino (who "guest directed" a scene in Sin City) on a double feature called "Grindhouse", for which each director will make a trashy b-movie style feature split by especially-made trailers for fictional b-movies.