Originally, superhero comic books were aimed primarily at children, and so were the movies based upon those comic books. That’s not to say that plenty of adults didn’t enjoy 1978’s Superman and 1989’s Batman and 2002’s Spider-Man (2002), all of which were massive four-quadrant blockbusters. Still, there was a time, not so very long ago, when such films constituted a small subdivision of Hollywood’s offerings, counterbalanced by plenty of romcoms, dramas, erotic thrillers, and other fare for which parental guidance was either strongly suggested or firmly mandated. Nowadays, the Marvel Cinematic Universe—along with various competing but similarly adolescent-skewed franchises—pretty much owns America’s multiplexes, creating an entirely new baseline for what constitutes big-screen entertainment. Which is how we get a movie like Secret Headquarters (originally intended for theaters, though it wound up instead going straight to Paramount+), which amounts to “the MCU, but for kids,” as if that phrase weren’t fundamentally redundant. Conceived and co-written by Christopher Yost, who previously contributed to the screenplays for two Thor movies (The Dark World and Ragnarok), it’s a scaled-down version of the usual action-comedy-spectacle combo, reconfigured to place 14-year-olds front and center. And it’s got roughly the same strengths and weaknesses.

Prologues are practically de rigueur in this genre, so Secret Headquarters opens in 2012, when an ordinary dude named Jack Kincaid (Owen Wilson) stumbles upon a crashed spacecraft while camping and discovers a glowing alien power source. Ten years later, a superhero known as The Guard saves humanity on a regular basis, while Jack, now separated from his wife, keeps flaking on son Charlie (Walker Scobell, recently seen in The Adam Project) for reasons that even toddlers could be safely expected to guess. Abandoned yet again while staying over at Dad’s for his birthday, Charlie fakes arranging for his mom to pick him up, instead inviting best friend Berger (Keith L. Williams) over; Berger in turn brings Lizzie (Abby James Witherspoon, one of—I’m gonna assume there’s another for the sake of this dumb joke—Reese’s nieces), the classmate upon whom he’s been crushing, and Maya (Momona Tamada), another girl with whom Charlie has a tempestuous past relationship. Before any of that teen drama can get underway, however, Charlie accidentally triggers the mechanism that opens a hidden elevator, which leads to what simply has to be The Guard’s, yes, secret headquarters. Alas, he also eventually switches off a crucial cloaking device, revealing the location’s whereabouts to arms dealer Ansel Argon (Michael Peña, doing a malevolent riff on his motormouthed persona in the Ant-Man films) and Argon’s team of mercenaries, who’ve been seeking the Guard’s power source for years.

Although top-billed, Wilson’s very much a supporting player here. The emphasis is squarely on the four kids (plus Berger’s older brother, Eugene, who prefers to be called Big Mac, “because I’m the tastiest Berger”) and their resourcefulness at fending off malicious adults, with the help of all the alien tech found in the Guard’s underground lair. Some of this—jet packs, a device that can replicate any object—is standard wish fulfillment. A few gizmos qualify as clever, most notably two large rings that serve as portals, such that anything inserted into one appears through the other, irrespective of distance or whether its other end remains elsewhere. (This pays off when one of them gets hurriedly tossed into Berger’s locker at school.) For some reason, production designer Martin Whist (Super 8, The Cabin in the Woods) goes all in on hexagons, making it look as if everything’s been infected by some kind of virulent bathroom tile; directors Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman (Project Power, Nerve, Viral) likewise seem at a loss regarding how to render these toys visually dazzling, rather than just busy and/or loud. Rarely does Secret Headquarters succeed in creating a genuinely adventurous vibe, and its ostensible dramatic core—Charlie accepting that his father has had good reasons for not always being around, while Jack realizes that his son deserves his trust—barely registers.

It’s sometimes pretty funny, though. Even at their most formulaic and self-important, the MCU movies tend to benefit from regular injections of irreverence, and the same is true here; Scobell, in particular, knows how to throw away dialogue, so that Charlie’s incredulous protestation “The Guard is like the greatest hero ever. My dad can’t handle hot wings” plays as credibly wry-aggrieved, rather than landing hard in the manner of a sitcom-ready punch line. The other child actors hold their own, too (though Witherspoon can get a tad over-animated), keeping things suitably light even when the characters’ lives are threatened. And the film is prone to toss in totally random goofiness, as when a disconsolate Charlie, alone for the moment in Dad’s house, lip-syncs along with Anne Murray’s “I Just Fall in Love Again” (not terribly plausible, but I buy it more readily than I do the entire diner full of young people singing along with Roy Orbison’s minor 1989 hit “You Got It” in Nerve), or when one of the mercenaries hunting our heroes through Jack’s living room pauses for a second to remark “I have this lamp.” Yes, it’s dispiriting that Secret Headquarters concludes with a prolonged battle between two grown men clad in dumb-looking hexagon-festooned suits (identical suits, no less, their piping arbitrarily color-coded so that we know who’s who)…but at least that battle takes place in an elementary school hallway, and one of the participants, badly winded, calls for a time out halfway through so that he can greedily sip from the water fountain. Though that joke appeals more to olds than it does to this film’s target audience.