Review of Dora and the Lost City of Gold (2019) by Thequietgamer — 01 Jan 2020

Such a confused and misguided movie. In effort to bring Dora into a more realistic world free from things like talking backpacks, this live-action update establishes that all of the events from the TV show were imagined by the protagonist and her cousin Diego when they played pretend together as children, and proceeds to make fun of its animated counterpart from that point on. An idea that almost works. At least until the film breaks its own reality by including an anthropomorphic fox in a mask. A fox we are clearly shown Dora and Diego imagining at the start of the movie. Yet neither of them even react in the slightest to seeing it stand before them in the flesh. Or that he's talking. Which is messy to say the least.

The humor is very hit or miss. Things are at their most consistently humorous and entertaining when Dora goes to the city after years spent living in the jungle and has to navigate the intricacies of highschool. This is where I wish the movie had stayed as it was really on to something there. Unfortunately, it takes it takes a bizarre left turn and we end up back in the jungle on some sort of Indiana Jones-esque adventure where we are then ferried from one tonally incoherent setpiece to next and it seems like the movie loses all grip on what it wants to be before culminating in one of the most poorly choreographed musical numbers I've ever seen.

It's definitely a cute film, but the vision behind it seems so muddled and even self-contradictory that all I feel is confusion and disdain. Little kids on the other hand are likely going to love this for all of its silly humor. I'd challenge those youngsters to revisit it in a few years though, as I doubt that they'll find much value in it when they're older.