Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Secret Headquarters’ on Paramount+, Starring Owen Wilson as a Superhero Keeping a Secret From His Kid

Owen Wilson is a lefty dweeb-turned-superhero in Secret Headquarters, a cheery family movie now on Paramount+. Directors Ariel Schulman and Henry Joost shifted from horror (a couple of Paranormal Activitys) to non-franchise superpowered-human movies, beginning with 2020’s Netflix outing Project Power, which was far more violently R-rated. So will Secret HQ be suitably entertaining FOR KIDS OF ALL AGES, or what?

SECRET HEADQUARTERS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Nighttime. A remote woodsy locale. The Kincaid fam is roasting roastables over their campfire when zoomcrashbangboom, lights streak across the sky and hit the earth with a fiery whoomph nearby. Jack (Owen Wilson) tells everyone to sit tight while he checks it out, since no emergency help will arrive soon. He hops in his army-green VW van with the “make America green again” bumper sticker – please note, the guy’s a lefty – and finds the crash site. An Air Force pilot (Jesse Williams) is still alive and staring at, well goldarnit, a damned UFO, can you believe it? A glowing orb thing emerges from the craft and envelops Jack in some kind of crazy bubble and hey, guess what, I think this is an ORIGIN STORY!

Subtitle: 10 YEARS LATER. Jack is never ever ever ever ever ever ever around. Always missing his 13-year-old son Charlie’s (Walker Scobell) baseball games. “Very important work to do,” is his excuse. On the rare occasion Jack makes plans with Charlie, he almost always has to cancel on him. Jack has a mom, Lily (Jessie Mueller), and I think she and Jack are divorced or something; that part is mushy and fuzzy like an old moldy peach. Charlie has a bestie named Berger (Keith L. Williams), and they totally crush on schoolmates Maya (Momona Tamada) and Lizzie (Abby James Witherspoon, niece of Reese). There’s a TV news bit playing in Charlie’s house about a superhero dubbed The Guard – a visual cross-amalgamation of Iron Man and a Power Ranger – who’s single-handedly taking a major bite out of crime and warfare on a global scale, something Ansel Argon (Michael Pena), CEO of a military-arms manufacturer, doesn’t say he doesn’t like very much, but it’s definitely implied.

There. You now have all the pieces. Please assemble them into a Movie Plot. Here, I’ll get you started: It’s Charlie’s birthday, and Jack finally has time for some father-son bonding. They go to Jack’s bachelor pad, which is in a remote locale, and just as they’re in the swing of playing video games on a specific name-brand console and eating specific name-brand frozen pizza, Jack gets called to do some more very important work. What kind of work does Jack say he does? You got it – computer stuff! So when Jack vamooses, Charlie calls his aforementioned pals to hang out, and what do you think they discover? (Hint: it’s right there in the movie title.) And is this a far from opportune time for them to be in a certain location when a certain previously established villain wants to breach said certain location to find certain things that could almost certainly solve some of his solvency problems? NO SPOILERS BRO.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Secret Headquarters takes the Sky High screenplay and the Iron Man screenplay and shuffles them together like a deck of cards.

Performance Worth Watching: Let’s face it – nobody’s doing any heavy lifting here, dramatically or, unfortunately, comedically. Walker Scobell ably handles the movie’s protagonist role, but the fairly bland material doesn’t allow him to show the flashes of color and wit we saw from him in The Adam Project.

Memorable Dialogue: Pena’s character isn’t above middle-school insults: “You remind me of a fart.”

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: Secret Headquarters aims for amiability, affability and agreeability (and probably a few other -abilities), and for that reason alone, it’s a perfectly consumable family movie for the streaming era. The script zings off a few medium-snappy one liners (“Didn’t know it was Zero Dark Thirty in here!”, “This isn’t the time for an airing of grievances!”), puts a diverse cast of young actors center-stage for some FX-heavy shenanigans (whaddaya think happens when they discover jetpacks and magnet-wands?) and throws in a few moderately violent close scrapes that aren’t particularly suspenseful because the conclusion to the conflict is so foregone, you saw it coming as soon as you read Paramount’s one-line summary. All in a day’s work of creating products!

So this is junk-food entertainment, professionally executed on a modest budget, wholesome and non-offensive, colorful and brief at a little over 90 minutes. (The Guard’s vehicle deploys a weapon dubbed The Discombobulator, and it’s a relief to watch an action flick that doesn’t fire its movie-editing equivalent at us, maintaining its visual clarity even when things get hectic.) It’s also unchallenging, overly familiar and likely to inspire any viewer over the age of 13 or so tuning out after about an hour. Schulman and Joost keep it slick and snappy, working through boilerplate plot fodder – adolescent crushes, mild family discord, the fate of the world and other misc. banalities – all the easier for the movie to glide on by and not leave much of an impression, but hey, at least the kids aren’t watching shrieking YouTube motormouths, right?

Our Call: I know. Faint praise for Secret Headquarters. It’s fine. Use once and destroy. Go ahead and STREAM IT and be 51 percent amused and 49 percent unamazed.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com.

Stream Secret Headquarters on Paramount+