Dora and the Lost City of Gold Does Just Enough Right

Why did we need a live-action Dora the Explorer movie? I suppose we don’t really need any movie, but in the case of Dora and the Lost City of Gold, what led to this preschool cartoon getting the live-action feature film treatment? Closest I can speculate is that Paramount Pictures wanted some of that money that Disney has gotten from giving animated classics like Beauty and the Beast the live-action treatment. Dora is nowhere near as beloved Aladdin, so it’s no wonder Dora’s total domestic box office haul couldn’t even compare to the opening weekend of most live-action Disney remakes. Pity since Dora and the Lost City of Gold is actually better than the vast majority of the films it’s imitating.

Dora and the Lost City of Gold starts itself off on a clever note by showing Dora and her cousin Diego romping through the forest with their talking animal friends. It’s a direct live-action recreation of the original cartoon…and then it’s revealed to all be in the imagination of the two kids. Dora may have a monkey companion named Boots, but he doesn’t talk or actually wear red boots. In reality, Dora lives with her adventurer parents (played by Michael Pena and Eva Longaria) and, after Diego moves away to the city, grows up without any interaction with other people her age. Now a teenager (and portrayed by Isabella Moner), Dora is reunited with Diego in Hollywood once her parents go off on an expedition for fabled lost city of gold.

Attending a traditional High School emphasizes how…different Dora is. She tends to look off and ask inquisitive questions to people who aren’t there. She’s got an endlessly optimistic attitude. She doesn’t have much of a filter. This puts her in direct conflict with the other kids at the school, including Diego. Whoever decided Dora should be a Buddy the Elf/Princess Giselle fish-out-of-water in a High School setting deserves an extra pay raise. It’s such an unexpected direction to take a Dora movie but it turns out to be a great way to make this character sustain a feature-length adventure. Dora’s now defined as the kind of person who clings to hope even in the middle of the most turbulent instances of teenage awkwardness.

Then Dora and the Lost City of Gold takes a gear-shifted about a third of the way into its runtime. Dora and three of her High School classmates get kidnapped and taken to Peru. Their kidnappers are evildoers who want to use Dora’s parents to find that ancient city of gold. Here, Dora and the Lost City of Gold becomes a kind of Indiana Jones Jr., which is also not a bad direction to take a Dora movie at all. Still, the second act of Dora turns out to be its weakest stretch. The plot has a tendency to get unexpectedly convoluted, complicated, like in the introduction of some ancient figures guarding the city.

Meanwhile, a little bit of the extremely wacky slapstick antics of supporting character Alejandro Gutiérrez (Eugenio Derbez) goes a long way. Still, for the most part, it all works as a serviceable adventure romp, one that benefits greatly from Isabella Moner’s endearing commitment to her chipper role. It’s also nice that bringing a kids cartoon to the big screen hasn’t inspired screenwriters Nicholas Stoller and Matthew Robinson to embrace grating cynicism to appear “hip”. These two, along with director James Bobin, have no problem with making a sincere ode to friendship and those who feel like their outcasts.

None of it’s very original but for young kids, it’ll prove unique enough. For the adults watching Dora, there’s enough cleverness on display to make it a better-than-average kids movie, even if its most tired elements (instances of bathroom humor and a predictable plot twist involving a character being actual evil) keep it from being truly excepcional. You know what the best part of Dora and the Lost City of Gold is? Swiper! He gets the funniest moments of the movie, many of them enhanced by the fact that Benicio del Toro is lending his vocals to such a wacky creation. If the Dora franchise continues, I wouldn’t be opposed to Swiper: A Dora Story.