TL;DR: Dora and the Search for Sol Dorado is a visually energetic, well-meaning kids’ adventure that never quite captures the spirit of its source material—or the anarchic joy of its cinematic inspirations. Samantha Lorraine brings heart to a sanitized script, but it’s more Jungle Cruise than Indiana Jones. Parents won’t suffer, but they also won’t remember it.

When Dora Grew Up and Hollywood Got Bored

Let’s get something out of the way first: I was not the target audience for Dora the Explorer when it debuted in 2000. I was too old to learn Spanish by asking my TV where the bridge was. But like many of us who grew up in the early aughts, I couldn’t escape Dora’s singsong voice and her fourth-wall-breaking, bilingual charm. She was a phenomenon—an earnest, map-wielding whirlwind of exploration, optimism, and just a dash of chaos.

So when Dora and the Lost City of Gold came out in 2019, I was curious. Not excited. Not dreading it. Just…curious, in the same way you might feel about someone adapting Blue’s Clues into a live-action noir detective thriller. And you know what? That movie had a certain surprising charm. It leaned into its weirdness, poked fun at its own legacy, and let Isabela Moner’s Dora be both self-aware and totally sincere.

Fast forward to 2025, and we’ve arrived at the inevitable: a straight-to-streaming sequel, Dora and the Search for Sol Dorado, now playing on Paramount+. This time, Samantha Lorraine dons the backpack and bob, trading campy nostalgia for a slightly more action-oriented coming-of-age story. And while this new Dora is still earnest, still brave, and still fluent in the language of exposition, the adventure around her feels a little too manufactured, like an animatronic jungle ride that promises thrills but never goes off the rails.

A Legend, a Map, and a Corporate-Sponsored Theme Park

The setup is classic Dora, if a little more streamlined for the TikTok generation. Lorraine’s Dora has grown into a plucky teenager raised in the Amazon, her head filled with her grandfather’s bedtime tales about the Incas and their golden relics. But she’s not just collecting shiny things for fun—she’s on a quest to find Sol Dorado, a mythical golden sun rumored to grant one wish.

It’s a premise straight out of a mid-2000s Saturday morning cartoon. Or, more accurately, the kind of story that thinks it’s part of the Indiana Jones extended universe, without quite understanding why those movies clicked. We’re talking spiked tomb floors, oversized bugs, treasure maps, and ancient riddles that just so happen to rhyme in English.

Dora is joined by her cousin Diego (Jacob Rodriguez), who plays the pretty-but-expendable companion usually reserved for a female love interest. And let’s be honest: it’s refreshing to see a kid’s movie resist the urge to wedge in romance where it doesn’t belong. This isn’t about puppy love—it’s about legacy, bravery, and bugs the size of toasters.

The antagonist? A reality-TV archaeologist named Camilla the Crusader (played with pantomime glee by Daniella Pineda), who operates Jungle World—a knockoff Disney-style theme park full of faux temples and family-friendly danger. She’s less a villain and more a marketing executive’s fever dream: part Lara Croft, part Elon Musk, and 100% designed to sell merch.

But even with booby traps and boss fights, Sol Dorado never quite finds its rhythm. The action is there, yes. The set pieces are competently choreographed. And the kids—my niece and nephew included—giggled at the occasional fart joke or bug-squash. But the film lacks that spark, that unruly, joyful madness that makes for a great family adventure. It’s all a bit… focus-grouped.

Raiders of the Lost Spark

Look, no one expected this to be The Goonies or even National Treasure: Junior Edition. But when your film wears its influences like themed apparel (seriously, there’s a scene with a rolling boulder that screams “don’t sue us, Spielberg”), you’re inviting comparisons that probably won’t end well.

And it’s not just about the recycled tropes. It’s about tone. Where Lost City of Gold embraced absurdity and had a little fun at its own expense, Search for Sol Dorado plays things weirdly straight. The stakes are there—ancient wish-granting magic, evil archaeologists, intergenerational trauma—but the movie doesn’t quite commit to either camp or depth. It wants to be both earnest and thrilling, but ends up neither.

Take Lorraine’s Dora. She’s genuinely endearing, with a grounded confidence and natural charisma. But the script gives her precious little to do emotionally beyond deliver exposition and look brave. She’s not given enough space to be weird, or funny, or layered. And in a world where Bluey can make adults cry over a kid’s imaginary friend, that feels like a missed opportunity.

Diego, too, is relegated to a sidekick with nice hair. The rest of the supporting cast is a grab bag of cartoonish tropes—there’s the brainy one, the scaredy-cat, the animal sidekick (don’t worry, Boots gets a brief cameo). But none of them stick. None of them evolve. They’re accessories, not characters.

Streaming Purgatory and the Curse of Safety

Here’s the real issue: Dora and the Search for Sol Dorado feels like a product, not a film. You can almost hear the pitch meeting: “What if we do a second Dora movie, but make it safe, plastic, and algorithmically digestible?” It’s the streaming-era curse—films designed to be background noise for tablet-tapping tweens and exhausted parents.

And maybe that’s okay. Not every kids’ movie needs to be Paddington 2. But the problem isn’t that Sol Dorado plays it safe—it’s that it plays it forgettable. There’s a version of this story, hidden under the surface, that could’ve been richer. What if Dora’s wish wasn’t about treasure, but about healing her fractured family? What if Camilla the Crusader was a cautionary tale about cultural appropriation in the age of theme parks? What if the jungle fought back?

Instead, we get closeups of rubbery CGI insects and a message about “believing in yourself” that could’ve been lifted from any animated feature made in the last decade.

Still, I’ll give it this: it kept the kids quiet for 97 minutes, and I only had to check my phone three times.

The Long Shadow of Dora’s Legacy

It’s worth stepping back for a second and recognizing what Dora actually meant to a whole generation of kids—especially bilingual and first-generation kids who saw themselves reflected in a mainstream, global phenomenon. Dora wasn’t just a Nickelodeon character; she was cultural representation in a backpack.

This movie… gestures toward that, but it doesn’t embody it. There’s no real engagement with Incan history, no meaningful exploration of Latinx identity. The film uses South American mythology as a decorative backdrop, not a foundation. It wants the aesthetic without the depth—kind of like Jungle World itself.

Which brings us full circle. If the film had leaned into that critique—if it had turned the lens inward on how media sanitizes history for entertainment—it could’ve been bold. But Sol Dorado isn’t bold. It’s blandly competent. It delivers just enough sparkle to avoid sinking, but never enough to shine.

Verdict: Shiny, Not Solid

There’s a place in the world for a movie like Dora and the Search for Sol Dorado. It’s colorful, fast-paced, and inoffensive—perfectly engineered for sleepovers and Saturday afternoons. But it’s also forgettable, a sequel that loses the fun in its search for polish.

Samantha Lorraine deserves better. So does Dora. But maybe, in a world of content-overload and infinite scroll, “not terrible” is its own kind of victory.