Review : The Road to El Darado

The Road to El Darado : The adventure of two swindlers who get their hands on a map to the fabled city of gold, El Dorado while pulling off some sort of scam. Their plan goes bad and the rogues end up lost at sea after a number of misfortunes. Oddly enough, they end up on the shores of El Dorado and are worshiped by the natives for their foreign appearance.

This film intends to have something for everyone and be viewable to any one of any age and relate to both children and adult audience. The Road to El Dorado is probably considered to be the most criminally underrated animated movie Dreamworks has ever had. This one had it all: a golden cast, an epic journey, comedy, suspense, drama, action, and best of all, Kenneth Branaugh and Kevin Kline starring in roles which compliment their efforts as actors, they get to have fun with this and be let loose into more flexible territory, it's a very comfortable performance.

This film is also very educational on the perspective of what you see as well as what you are told. For instance the Aztec like culture of the lost city, what people wear, the colours, the tradition and values and customs; all these things speak great volumes and add great depth to the story and into that the overall enjoyment of the film. 

It's very adventurous. It sets off on a really good, steady pace. Lots of good humour through-out, lots of pacy and heavy action, lots of running about. All of which can excite the viewer into liking it more, so the film does perhaps go that extra mile in order to entice itself in the story telling.

I think the two main characters sell it the best, they could very easily be boring characters. But they are not. They are both con artists, they make a living out of fobbing people off for their money's worth. Now by some unfortunate happenstance or bad luck end up on a ship and unintentionally become stowaways. 

They are imprisoned, escape in a row boat, become castaways, then go from being that to being stranded on a desert island, to embarking on a quest to find an ancient lost city of gold, that no one has seen for centuries, they find the city of gold and are mistaken for being gods. 

Playing for time they pretend to be gods in order to get close to the gold. As things go, plans change. What happens in the end is that going into a situation thinking that they can get away with kicking their gold, they save it from destruction. 

The problem with the film of course is it's narrow perspective of story telling, the purpose of it. It's not clearly explained as to what it was all for due to lack of depth into the civilisation of el dorado that preceded it, but of course to go into that in more detail you would have to allow more time to extend the depth of background further to enable that understanding and that rings alarm bells of the film becoming boring. So it contains a concern within itself, it's not a major fault, but it is something to look into when watching this film a second or a third time.

Otherwise, very good indeed. 8/10

NEXT : The Theory of Everything!