I say: Get this cast out of the recording booth and into a live-action comedy, set it somewhere far from the deaths of millions, and sit back and count the money and the kudos as they roll in.Īs for the animation, it's compelling enough, but weirdly overcolored.
#The road to el dorado english series
They play off each other in exactly the goofy yet reassuringly pleasant way Bing and Bob did in their legendary series of films, and the spirited Perez makes a great stand-in for Dorothy Lamour. They have the mysterious thing called chemistry. The best thing, absolutely, is the verbal byplay between the two stars in that recording booth somewhere in Lala. "El Dorado" progresses in a state of total obliviousness it feels ever so slightly creepy. That would include colonialism, nationalist aspiration, racism, the enduring agonies of a people decreed inferior by men who'd had the foresight to invent the musket and the cathedral. This is not a funny time or place and what it wrought, these centuries later, is still with us in a number of ways, all of them tragic. I can only call it moral appropriateness, ominous as that may sound.
#The road to el dorado english movie
And who would want to see a historically accurate feature about the looting and slaughter of a culture?Īt the same time, the movie lacks a certain virtue difficult to identify. Thus when the two heroes high-five or show a passionate humanism that was inconceivable in the barbarous quasi-medieval world of 1519, it's engineered to be part of the loopy, improvisatory feel of the piece. They are, after all, intentional and the whole thing is one big nutty stylization.
Now, possibly I make too much of the anachronisms. The boys win the map gambling with sailors, they're chased by cops, they fall into barrels, the barrels are shipped off on Cortes' voyage to the Americas, they are caught by the big bad boy himself (this Cortes resembles Robert Goulet on steroids and methamphetamines), they escape in a small boat (with a horse, of course!), landing exactly at the starting point of the map, they find the city, they are mistaken for gods (nice work if you can get it), they become involved in political squabbles between religious and secular factions, they end human sacrifice, and they introduce Elton John's music to the New World. It's the ramshackle, fly-by-night, omigosh story line of low-budget '40s comedies locked in the high-tech stylizations of 21st-century computer digitizing, an odd and not altogether satisfying fit. The movie repeats what might be called the plot patterns of the Crosby-Hope pictures: Nothing in it is thought out terribly well and nobody cares. The boys, Tulio and Miguel, appear to be roving Shakespearean actors half a century before the birth of the Bard they acquire a map to the legendary city of gold whose existence has been tantalizing the Spanish imagination since 1492 and manage through a number of thin pretexts to bumble over there and find it. The movie opens in a Spanish port city in 1519 with two plucky Spaniards-you know, the American and the English kind (the voices are Kevin Kline's and Kenneth Branagh's the characters are animated to resemble those men 25 years ago). That embarrassing business about the Aztec tendency toward recreational human sacrifice? Your typical peasant family as an ambulatory McDonald's for the upper classes? Make a joke of it! The whole thing is like a pie fight in hell. Yet all that is exactly what DreamWorks has created with its high-end, tone-deaf, color-saturated "Road to El Dorado," which glosses over the more complex issues in search of the vaudeville values of goofiness, wackiness and hellzapoppin' fun. He ended up rich, they ended up dead.Ĭomedy? Laughs? Hey, folks, what about some darned entertaining musical numbers? What about cute li'l Rosie Perez's pictograph as a sassy Aztec babe with a New York 'tude, an upturned nose and a pair of hips so bouncy they could titillate the senior class at St. With guns and horses and armor-and ultimately germs-he cut a swath through an ancient civilization in the name of God (his) and gold (theirs). That holocaust is initiated by the arrival to Mexico of the syphilitic Spanish mercenary Hernando Cortes, bringer of death to the thousands, maybe the tens of thousands and even possibly the millions. After all, it's essentially an animated Crosby-Hope picture set in a holocaust. "The Road to El Dorado" plays so close to the line it leaves me a little woozy. A treasure map leads Tulio and Miguel into a series of misadventures.
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