Trailers
for movies aimed at children rarely prompt the kind of stir created by the one
for Beverly Hills Chihuahua. Unveiled in front of Prince Caspian, it promised a tacky explosion of
anthropomorphized dogs rapping their way through a blinged-out L.A. when not
exploring the cultural links of Chihuahuas to Aztec culture. It looked, in
short, like a stomachache covered in tinsel. Still, films this unpromising send
out vibes on a frequency that only bad movie lovers can hear. Unfortunately for
masochists, they can probably skip this one. It's not good, but it's not the Gone
With The Wind of
terrible talking animal movies promised by the trailer's dire 90 seconds. (That
title, by the way, still belongs to 1995's Gordy.)
Drew
Barrymore provides the voice of Chloe, the pampered lapdog of fashion icon
Jamie Lee Curtis. Left in the not-so-competent hands of Curtis' niece
(star-of-tomorrow-circa-2000 Piper Perabo), Chloe finds herself lost in Mexico
and kidnapped, in a possible nod to Amores Perros, by evil dogfighters. But before
she can become a pint-sized bloodstain on the floor of a fighting pit (it is a
kids' movie, after all), she escapes with the help of a German shepherd named
Delgado (voiced by Andy Garcia), a former police dog with a dark secret. (Okay,
it's not that dark: He can't smell.) While Perabo, Curtis' landscaper Michael
Urie, and Urie's Chloe-smitten Chihuahua Papi (George Lopez) search for the
lost pooch, Chloe and Delgado wander Mexico. There they find a rat-and-iguana
con-animal team and a pack of Chihuahuas living in an Aztec ruin and adhering
to the Chihuahua Pride teachings of a patriarch named Montezuma (voiced by Plácido
Domingo, seriously).
This is not
a movie for anyone who's aged past the "Oh! Cute!" phase of moviegoing. It's
paced for little minds with short attention spans who aren't disturbed by
live-action animals with not-so-convincing CGI mouths that let them talk to one
another. (A side thought-exercise: If you were an animal who could understand
what humans were saying but could not communicate your needs to them, wouldn't
you quickly become tormented or depressed? Maybe that's Garfield's problem.)
Anyone else should stay away. But for kids who like dogs and grown-ups who
don't mind a movie filled with pro-adopt-a-shelter-dog messages, it could
theoretically be worse.