I might as well admit that I settled in to watch Beverly Hills Chihuahua with a fair amount of cynicism. The opening scenes left me staring bitterly at the screen, thinking, “This must be what goes on in your head when you’re stupid.” But I stuck with it, constantly reminding myself that Drew Barrymore is my imaginary best friend, and in the end I felt a little bad for having judged it so harshly. Once Beverly Hills Chihuahua finds its bark, it’s actually kind of heartwarming.
In the beginning, Chloe (voiced by Drew Barrymore) is a prissy, pampered little Chihuahua who wears frilly pink outfits complete with tiny dog booties. She’s accustomed to prime rib dinners, massage appointments, and play dates with similarly spoiled pups spent by the pool. She’s not a yippy or unpleasant dog, she’s just a bit sheltered and limited from spending so much of her life jet-setting around town in her owner’s purse. She’s not used to ordinary doggy things like rolling around in fertilizer or eating bugs, and when the gardner’s dog Papi (voiced by George Lopez) tries to woo her, she can’t see past his gauche, common ways.
When Chloe’s doting owner, Viv (Jamie Lee Curtis), heads to Europe on a business trip, she leaves Chloe in the care of Rachel (Piper Perabo), her sweet but scatterbrained niece.
Chloe’s not too sure about this arrangement, and she’s even less thrilled when Rachel piles them into the car for a weekend in Mexico with friends. Unsurprisingly, Chloe gets lost within the first day, but Rachel is far more contrite than you might expect. After all, she loves her Aunt Viv, and she never meant for anything to go wrong.
So begins Chloe’s journey back to Beverly Hills and toward a future as a better version of herself. While Rachel, the gardner, and Papi search for her in earnest, Chloe does her best to get home on her own. Along the way she is befriended by Delgado, a manly but troubled former police dog (voiced by Andy Garcia) who always seems to come to the rescue at just the right time. If you’re prone to developing crushes on cartoon animals (like, say, Jeremy in The Secret of Nimh or Charlie in All Dogs Go To Heaven), then you’ll very likely fall for him. Ahem. Not that that’s ever happened to me.
I notice that I just referred to this movie as a cartoon, and for all intents and purposes it could be. The dogs chat with one another with such nonchalance that it’s hard to see them as real, and anything resembling animal stunt work is clearly animated. For the most part, the jokes hit hard, like the awkward interaction between Rachel and the gardner she assumes can’t speak English (think major pantomiming to the words “CAN YOU COME AND GET YOUR DOGGY-O?”) or the revenge of an all Chihuahua army led by Montezuma and followed by a bizarre equal rights rally for tiny, shaky dogs.
Having said that, the movie does have a sweet ending that demonstrates the power of friendship. Sometimes our greatest allies come in unlikely packages, and Beverly Hills Chihuahua does a nice job of showing that we could all learn a thing or two if we stepped out of our comfort zone and looked at the world from another point of view. I suspect I would have appreciated it even more if I were somewhere between the ages of five and ten, but even this cynic had a little tear in her eye at one point.
