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DORA AND THE LOST CITY OF GOLD
Director: James Bobin Cast: Isabela Moner, Jeff Wahlberg, Madeleine Madden, Nicholas Coombe, Eugenio Derbez, Michael Peña, Eva Longoria, Q'orianka Kilcher, the voices of Benicio Del Toro, Danny Trejo MPAA
Rating: Running Time: 1:42 Release Date: 8/9/19 |
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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 8, 2019 You don't need to know the specifics of "Dora the Explorer," the children's educational show that started in 2000 and is about to end, to understand it. Because the program has been so popular, you only need to have known a kid who has been alive since the show started to know of its existence. You really only need to have watched an episode or two of any television show aimed at young children to comprehend the basics. It's all about learning through repetition and interaction, as the intrepid Dora takes the young audience on a series of educational adventures, often speaking directly to viewers to solve some problem or learn something new. Now we get Dora and the Lost City of Gold, which supposes that Dora the Explorer had a childhood very much like the one portrayed in the television show—albeit with one important difference. All of the character's adventures were simply acts of imaginative playtime. Her jeep was just a cardboard box that was shaped and decorated like the vehicle. Whenever she talked directly to the "audience," asking if they knew how to pronounce a certain word, the people around her were left bewildered. Her best friend, a wild monkey, was real, but she couldn't actually talk to it. Also real, obviously, was her cousin, who went along with the games because there's not much else to do in the middle of a South American jungle. After a brief prologue, establishing the idea that the young Dora (played by Madelyn Miranda) was just a kid with a hyper-active imagination and nothing better to do other than learning, Matthew Robinson and Nicholas Stoller's screenplay moves to the present day. Dora (Isabela Moner), now a teenager, still lives in the jungle with her parents (played by Michael Peña and Eva Longoria), still has a monkey named Boots as a best friend, and still talks to an "audience" that no one else can see (Her vocabulary has improved, though, now telling the unseen kids about a poisonous frog and asking if they can say the word "neurotoxicity"). Her adventures are more real, though, and at the start, Dora is looking for clues about a legendary, ancient Incan city. With this new clue, the parents plan to set out on their own adventure, but in their minds, Dora, as smart and willing as she may be, isn't ready to join them. She has to go stay with her cousin Diego (Jeff Wahlberg) in Southern California and embark on her most dangerous adventure yet: surviving high school. The premise, then, is pretty simple: Dora is forced to adjust to a new place and a specific time, after living a sheltered life in the timelessness of the jungle. The movie begins and mostly continues as a comedy. It's much stronger, though, as a fish-out-of-water comedy, featuring a character who naïvely believes that all of her experiences are adventures and every learning opportunity deserves a song, than it is when the adventures become more literal. The plot turns from a clever and funny kind-of spoof, in which the character and her quirks are the focus, into something much more familiar—an attempt at being the kiddos' first foray into adventure movies. The material featuring Dora navigating but oblivious to the perils of being a weird kid in high school is quite funny, especially since the character is almost admirable in her ignorance to the social dangers of being an outsider. She greets everyone with a friendly, "Hello, I'm Dora!" The banner for a school dance announces that students should come dressed as their favorite star, and while everyone else looks like a celebrity, Dora arrives as the sun. Diego is generally mortified by his cousin's behavior. She makes a quick enemy of overachiever Sammy (Madeleine Madden), who doesn't like the new girl invading her status as the smartest kid in school, and even makes sort-of friends with the nerdy Randy (Nicholas Coombe). The actual plot kicks in when the four are abducted by mercenaries looking for the lost city and brought to the South American jungle. They're saved by Alejandro (Eugenio Derbez), an old friend of Dora's parents, and the group tries to find a way home or the ancient city of legend. The joke reverses in this segment, as Dora becomes the one prepared for the perils of her surroundings and the other kids find themselves as the naïve ones. Moner is game as the young explorer, playing the character straight instead of turning her into a gag, which highlights the humor instead of overwhelming it. That humor, too, is based on these characters, as broad as they may be, as well as in adapting the various conceits of a kids TV show into more realistic situations (such as a song about doing your, you know, business in the jungle). After a while, though, the story drags, as it falls back on the routine scenarios of adventure tales (ancient structures with elaborate puzzles and teaching a new generation of kids that quicksand is going to be an issue later in life). Dora and the Lost City of Gold remains amusing and occasionally strange (A villainous anthropomorphic fox actually exists in the real world, and some hallucinogenic spores turn the characters into cartoons), but something that so affably jokes about one formula suffers for relying on another one. Copyright © 2019 by Mark Dujsik. All rights reserved. |
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