Spare Parts movie review & film summary (2015)

But what truly saves “Spare Parts” from being just a glorified after-school special is that these Mexican-born kids, who attend a scrappy working-class high school in Arizona, are all undocumented immigrants who live in constant fear that they or family members could be deported at any time. And without a birth certificate or other proof of citizenship, their chances for achieving their dreams are severely limited.

The issue of so-called “illegals” could not be more timely and, if “Spare Parts” does anything, it attempts to humanize the situation of those children who cope with this limbo-land existence without having had much choice in the matter. 

But admirable intentions can’t entirely cover up major narrative flaws, and director Sean McNamara (who was behind the faith-based biopic “Soul Surfer”) spends too much time on the forced domestic melodramas and personal travails that each of the four students face and not enough on actually fleshing out their personalities. In fact, what should have been the main event – the actual competition that serves as the finale – arrives almost as an afterthought. Even Lopez’s character turns out to have a heart-wrenching reason for his current situation, but it just gets lost in the shuffle.

Each of the young actors has a distinctive appeal that isn’t entirely capitalized upon and their rapport with Lopez and each other is what should be front and center. Making the biggest impression is Carlos PenaVega as Oscar, a driven-to-succeed senior whose undocumented status stands in the way of him pursuing his dream of enlisting in the Army. Instead, he turns to Lopez and asks to start a robotics club so he can enter the contest, which involves building an underwater vehicle.

He ends up recruiting three other members: Cristian (David del Rio of “Pitch Perfect”), a bullied computer geek who is the brains of the operation; Lorenzo (Jose Julian, Demian Bichir’s son in “A Better Life”), a shaggy-haired mechanical whiz who isn’t above breaking into vehicles now and then; and Luis (newcomer Oscar Guitirrez), a gentle giant who provides the muscles to carry the vehicle in and out of the water. 

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