Dora, a teenage explorer, leads her friends on an adventure to save her parents and solve the mystery behind a lost city of gold.
In “Dora and the Lost City of Gold,” we accompany our intrepid heroine, Dora (Isabela Moner), as she traverses the jungles of South America with her friends as they search for her kidnapped parents. As a kid, Dora was raised in the jungle by her archaeological parents, Cole and Elena (Michael Peña and Eva Longoria) and her best friend was her cousin Diego (Jeff Wahlberg) but when Diego’s family decide to move to the U.S. for a better life, Dora is relegated to hanging out in the jungle with her only remaining friend Boots, a monkey. Ten years later, Cole and Elena come to the same conclusion as Diego’s parents, that moving Dora to America will be a great opportunity for her to gain an education but also make new friends. When she arrives in the States, she is wide-eyed and naive to everything and everyone around her but with the help of Diego, he helps her navigate the treacherous waters of high school. On a school trip to the Natural History Museum, Dora, Diego and their friends Randy (Nicholas Coombe) and Sammy (Madeleine Madden), get separated from the rest of the class and in the basement, they are all captured, placed in a large shipping container and gassed to sleep. When they awaken, they are in South America and Dora is told that unless she helps the mercenaries locate the Lost City of Gold, a location her parents were searching for before she left for the US, her mother and father will meet their demise.
With the help of Alejandro Gutierrez (Eugenio Derbez), a professor that claims to know her parents and turns up out of nowhere, they manage to escape into the jungle. With both Dora and Diego’s knowledge of the landscape, they manage to successfully journey through the treacherous jungle, avoiding booby traps, dangerous creatures, and deadly quicksand. When they arrive at the gates of the Lost City, Dora sees where the mercenaries are holding her parents captive and realizes that if she leads them all inside, they will kill her parents as well as her friends and Diego so she decides to enter the city along with Diego to get a headstart on them but when someone in her group turns out to be a traitor, she must move fast if she plans on saving the day and the Lost City of Gold.
Kids under 12 will likely enjoy the visuals and sight gags, including a fart-laden scene as our fearless heroes slowly sink into a pit of quicksand. The TV series that the movie is based on, “Dora the Explorer,” ran for six seasons and ended in 2006 so many of the kids who grew up watching her on TV will be much older now and seeing this big-screen iteration will be beneath them but there will always be a new generation that will need a positive heroine like Dora, one who is fearless and loves her parents and friends and enjoys teaching new learning experiences to her audience. The film is aimed squarely at a young audience but even I found some humorous moments throughout, including a scene where our protagonists accidentally inhale microorganisms from a spore-bearing plant that causes them all to hallucinate and see each other as animated versions of themselves, reminiscent of the TV show. “Dora and the Lost City of Gold” will keep the kiddies entertained for 100 minutes and they might also learn a little along the way.
In Theaters Friday, August 9th
