Teacher and students build a robot, and a dream

Few subjects in film are as risky as real-life heroes. Directors tend either to err on the side of sentimentality and make asinine puff pieces or focus so much on the message they lose the characters.

Luckily, Spare Parts avoids most of those pitfalls. Alternately funny, mushy, exciting, and always entertaining, the movie tells the true story of four students at an Arizona high school - undocumented Mexican immigrants - who beat out MIT, Stanford, and Cornell to win a national underwater robotics contest in 2004.

Based on reporter Joshua Davis' Wired magazine article and directed with great confidence and control by Sean McNamara (Space Warriors, TV's Kickin' It), Spare Parts stars George Lopez (School Dance, Rio 2) as Fredi Cameron, an out-of-work engineer with a Ph.D. who takes a massive pay cut to work as a substitute teacher at Carl T. Hayden Community High School in Phoenix.

Having led a peripatetic life since losing his wife and child in an accident, Fredi sees Phoenix as just another pit stop and refuses to put down roots or make friends, even resisting the admittedly cautious advances of the comely computer teacher, Gwen (Marisa Tomei).

That is, until he's recruited by one of his students, Oscar Vazquez (Carlos PenaVega), to start an engineering club and enter the school in a robotics contest sponsored by NASA and the U.S. Navy.

Fredi says yes, convinced that Oscar, a gung-ho ROTC student who can't join the Army because of his immigration status, will never pull it off. How could undocumented kids from an underfunded school in an impoverished Mexican American neighborhood possibly aim so high?

Lopez is rock-solid here, anchoring the performances of the film's four younger leads, including PenaVega (Big Time Rush, Code Academy); David Del Rio (The Troop) as Cristian Arcega, the foursome's expert in physics and engineering theory; José Julián (Shameless, The Bridge) as Lorenzo Santillan, a brilliant fiddler who can build just about anything with a motor; and Oscar Javier Gutierrez II as Luis Arranda, a talented cook who dreams of being a chef but who loves the idea of building a robot.

Spare Parts, which features a delightful turn by Jamie Lee Curtis as the school's manic, supportive principal, moves smoothly back and forth from scenes of the kids working hard as a team on the robot, to segments exploring each character's home life.

Cristian's small house is so crowded with family he sleeps next to a space heater in the garden shed. Lorenzo is emotionally abused by his father (Esai Morales), who forces him to take the blame for crimes committed by his American-born brother, Ramiro (Ray Aguayo). As Fredi explains it, Lorenzo has no future in America, so it doesn't matter if he takes the fall for Ramiro, who then will have it easier getting into college.

At the robot competition in Santa Barbara, Calif., the kids decide to enter the college challenge, arguing that their loss at that level would look less pathetic than if they competed against other high schools. Their craft looks impressive for its cost - $800. It doesn't look so cool next to the space-age entries from Ivy League schools costing tens of thousands of dollars to build.

At times, Spare Parts sails perilously close to the saccharine. But the film is a fine example of a message movie that does justice both to its important subject matter and to its characters' inner lives.

Directed by Sean McNamara. With George Lopez, Jamie Lee Curtis, Carlos PenaVega, Esai Morales, José Julián, David Del Rio, Oscar Gutierrez, Marisa Tomei. Distributed by Lionsgate.

Running time: 1 hour, 23 mins.

Parent's guide: R (profanity, some violence).

Playing at: area theaters.

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