Spy Kids 2: The Island of Lost Dreams is getting a mid-week opening today and is being greeted with about the same enthusiastic critical reception that the original garnered a year ago. "It's a wonderfully silly family movie that holds its audience in high regard," writes Jami Bernard in the New York Daily News. Wesley Morris in the Boston Globe enthuses: "The sequel is more adult than its predecessor, but just as gadget-packed and action-filled. Like a whacked piñata, it spills over with treasures." A.O. Scott in the New York Times calls the film "a gaudy, noisy thrill ride -- hyperactive, slightly out of control and full of kinetic, mischievous charm. The children who are its intended audience will scream with terror and delight and beg to go back for more." Director Robert Rodriguez is receiving special applause for pulling off a rare feat: assembling an effective sequel just one year after the original. "A master of whiz-bang shooting, rapid-fire editing and quick, blink-and-you-miss-it humor, Rodriguez is also a welcome aberration these days: a director whose idea of building a franchise is to make movies rather than merchandise," Ann Hornaday remarks in the Washington Post. (Indeed, he not only wrote and directed the film, but co-produced it, shot it, edited it, partly scored it, and even created many of the special effects on his home PC.) Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times comments that, with this sequel, Rodriguez is "proving himself to be perhaps the most gifted maker of live-action family adventure films around." There are a few dissenters. Carrie Rickey writes in the Philadelphia Inquirer that "each frame is crammed with so many gizmos and so much gobbledygook that it jams the audience's circuits." Peter Howell in the Toronto Star claims that "the series is aging faster than its pre-teen protagonists." And Eleanor Ringel Gillespie in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution concludes, "Anyone who knows how truly lovely and amazing the original movie was will be painfully disappointed."