Dora and the Lost City of Gold is a live-action movie based on Nickelodeon’s animated kids show, Dora the Explorer, which I remember premiering when I was a young child. I never in my wildest dreams thought I’d ever see a live-action Dora movie, as the concept of making one just seemed so ridiculous. I never could have imagined how the show would translate into movie form, and despite this the end product really isn’t all that bad.

The movie actually opens with a scene that is a heavy depiction of what the actual Dora the Explorer show would look like in live-action form. However, we then see that this is all a game that Dora plays, and is not reality. What is reality, though, is that Dora is the daughter of two explorers, and so she wants to be just like them. We then fast forward in time, where Dora is now a teenager still making wild adventures for herself in the jungle. Her parents realize that she needs to learn how to socialize with other kids, so they send her out of the jungle and into California, where she’ll be attending public school. We see Dora try to struggle with fitting in despite her eccentricities, but she soon finds herself on a wild adventure with some of her classmates in the jungle.

It’s a bit hard to explain, but it works in the context of the movie. The basic premise here is “a not-socially adjusted girl hunts for treasure with classmates that are totally out of their element.” It’s a fun dynamic that works really well.

The best thing that the movie has going for it is Isabela Moner, who plays the role of Dora. She just has this unrelenting positive energy coming from her, and she makes Dora such a fun character to follow. This is especially true in the beginning of the movie, where we see her refusing to not be herself around high schoolers who are doing nothing but ridiculing her for being who she is. She has such a huge charm to her, and it made the movie as enjoyable as it was for me.

The rest of it is just kind of cookie-cutter, though. It’s the kind of movie where I don’t have a large amount of complaints about it, but I also don’t have a ton of praises for it either. It’s pretty by-the-numbers most of the time, and only does something exceptional a few times in the movie. A lot of the characters are pretty thin, the treasure hunting story is formulaic, and the movie doesn’t take many risks. Despite this, nothing about it doesn’t work for the movie.

In the end, I think Dora and the Lost City of Gold is a great effort in bringing this series to a live-action setting. I think it’ll go over great with kids, and that’s probably the most important thing. However, for those of us that grew up on the show, it might be a bit underwhelming as an adult. Despite watching the show as a kid, I don’t think I was ever actually the target demographic, and so I had to face facts when watching this movie that it simply wasn’t made for me. And that’s fine. While my personal enjoyment of the movie wasn’t quite as high as I was hoping for, I don’t think this is a bad movie by any means. I think it’ll go over really well with the people that it was made for, so if you have any interest in it I do recommend giving it a shot. Just don’t expect anything mind-blowing from it.

3/5