Dora and the Lost City of Gold (2019)

(In French, On TV, November 2022) You can accurately gauge the age range of my daughter by the vehemence through which she refused to watch a movie about her former BFF Dora the Explorer. Of course, what she didn’t know is that this movie adaptation was more closely aimed at her age group (and up) than the pre-school “Swiper don’t swipe” set—In keeping with a number of adaptations of juvenile properties, the big-screen version of Dora and the Lost City of Gold had been noticeably aged into high school, and comes complete with plenty of one-liners showing awareness and embarrassment about the source material. This Dora is pitched as somewhere between a bright toddler and a sociable teen by virtue of having been homeschooled in the jungle: Much of the film’s first act is spent sending her back to school so she can collect the group of friends that will see her through her subsequent adventures tracking down a lost treasure and her missing parents. In my encroaching old age traditionalism, I’m not all that happy about the satirical/distanciation mechanism used here toward the source material: While I’m a sarcastic guy myself, I’m not sure there’s any inherent value in punching down at an innocent educational kid’s show. (Nor am I all that happy at the recent trend of taking innocuous fare and making it outright horrific—it smacks more of juvenilia than transgression. But that’s a topic for another time.)  Still, bringing Dora into teen comedy does make the result more entertaining: Dora and the Lost City of Gold is not that great of a movie, but there are a few chuckles here and there. Isabela Merced does rather well as the adorably cheerful Dora, with Michael Peña and Eva Longoria dropping by as Dora’s parents. (The other big names are Danny Trejo and Benicio del Toro, providing voices.)  The PG humour is broad and sometimes just a bit too insistent, but it works to make us forget that the budget is just a bit too limited to show a tween Indiana Jones. So, really, I take it back—Dora and the Lost City of Gold has just the right blend of self-awareness to make it work, and for once having an upbeat can-do heroine is really something to be celebrated. In fact, I may try once more to get my daughter to watch it.