Beverly Hills Chihuahua (2008)

Live in harmony with one another; do not be
haughty, but associate with the lowly; do not
claim to be wiser than you are.
Romans 12:6

Although at first off-putting (for me) because of the nauseatingly way in which Jamie Lee Curtis’s cos metic mogul Aunt Viv pampers her little dog Chloe (voice of Drew Barrymore), a tiny Chihuahua, the film grew on me (a little) as the snobby little beast met her come-uppance when stranded in Mexico. I will not attempt to summarize the silly plot, part of which reminded me of Mark Twain’s The Prince and the Pauper and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court because a royal character in each leaves his familiar, pampered palace and suffers indignities in the strange outside world, but winds up a better person for the experience. It is a familiar plot line, but an enjoyable one (if you do not think about the silly unrealities), with various talking dogs helping Chloe along the way while the vapid humans who lost her in the first place frantically follow her in an attempt to return her to her home before Aunt Viv returns from a trip and discovers what has happened.

However, the sequence in which a huge flock of Chihuahuas inhabiting a ruined Aztec city is a bit too much, even though their slogan “We are tiny, but we are mighty” might be uplifting for small viewers. Parents should be warned that the scenes in which dognappers place Chloe into a dogfight pit will probably be too scary for young children. My advice for those wanting a family film is to go again to a really good film such as WALL-E again, and get this turkey when your local library adds it to their collection (No, don’t rent this thing!). If you do watch this, the redeeming part will be identifying the voices of a galaxy of Latin stars who lend their voices to the proceedings—Andy Garcia, George Lopez., Edward James Olmos, George Lopez, Salma Hayek, Cheech Marin, Luis Guzman, and even Plácido Domingo.