Beverly Hills Chihuahua
BY Ryan LaMarca / 2009-05-19
The movie "Beverly Hills Chihuahua" is a Disney movie best suited for another decade. Back in the 1990s, this type of movie would have been the standard for live-action Disney, and while 2008 audiences ate up this tripe, it wasn't because it was a great movie. No, it's because people just love talking dogs, especially fashionable and spoiled rich dogs voiced by well known celebrities. And even worse, Raja Gosnell is behind this movie, and heaven knows that can't be a good thing.
Chihuahua Chloe (voice of Drew Barrymore) is a pampered dog living in Beverly Hills, and she loves the good life. When her owner, Vivian Ashe (Jamie Lee Curtis) goes out of town, Chloe is entrusted to her niece, Rachel (Piper Perabo). As Rachel and some friends go on a trip to Mexico, Chloe is dognapped, and is set to be held for ransom. With the aid of a German Shepherd named Delgado (voice of Andy Garcia), Chloe tries to make her way home safely as she is hunted by the evil dog El Diablo (voice of Edward James Olmos) who wants to bring her back to the dognapper.
So, the animals start to talk and everything's all fun and games at first, but then it becomes very old, very fast. Yes, it's cute at the beginning as you watch people parade their pooches around in designer clothes, but then it starts to digress into something bizarre and eerie. The movements of the mouths on these dogs feel unnatural and unsynchronized. Things just get weirder and weirder, and the whole movie accomplishes nothing. And that's the major problem, "Beverly Hills Chihuahua" is not even entertaining in the slightest.
For those of you who don't recognize his name, the director of "Beverly Hills Chihuahua" is Raja Gosnell. You might remember him as the person who single handedly ruined "Scooby-Doo" on the big screen. And you can see Gosnell's handiwork all over "Beverly Hills Chihuahua" from the vapid empty caricatures to the doggie double entendres to his personal gold standard: poop jokes galore.
But moreover, the way some of these people pamper their dogs just blew my mind. Sure, we all love our dogs and spoil them, but the people in this movie take it to the extreme. As Chloe's owner leaves her, she tells the babysitter about her schedule. The dog has a schedule with visits to the park and play dates with other dogs and reserved manicures and pedicures. I kid you not, but this is most likely one of the more realistic aspects of the movie.
And the movie is filled with ever hackneyed Disney and kids' movie cliché in the book. The rich and spoiled dog will eventually learn to treat others with respect and value the little things in life. The lead female character begins a romantic relationship with the gardener who she overlooked and treated poorly before. The gardener's dog is madly in love with Chloe. It all just goes on too far that it becomes unbearable at a certain point.
Incidentally, talk about bad career choices. Jamie Lee Curtis returns to work in this movie after supposedly retiring from acting. Now, Curtis does as fine a job as one could expect with this material, but why does she make these movies? She's such a wonderful actress and could be doing other movies that suit herself so much better. Oh yeah, and Piper Perabo is in the movie, too. With the roles that Perabo keeps getting, I'm likely to think she's never make it anywhere above this low level of movie-making.
I think it would be interesting to compare "Beverly Hills Chihuahua" to another similarly themed Disney movie from 2008, "Bolt." Both feature fish-out-of-water dogs who go on a road trip back home with the help of new friends they meet along the way. So, I guess you could say that "Beverly Hills Chihuahua" is the live-action equivalent of "Bolt," if you removed all the heart, charm, and wit from the animated picture.
Children's entertainment doesn't have to be so childish, and Disney is a studio who has shown us this time and again. But movies like "Beverly Hills Chihuahua" only seek to hurt the movement to legitimize the family movie. And that's also because it isn't a family movie, so much as a children's only movie. Most adults, except maybe those who might excuse the movie's ineptitude because of the fact that there are cute talking dogs, will want to avoid "Beverly Hills Chihuahua" at all costs.
Post Your Comment
Avatar
Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel