Say what you will about Jamie Lee Curtis, but I say she’s still got it.

It doesn’t matter if she’s the focus of the movie, or if she’s only a small part of it–she’s still got it.  And Beverly Hills Chihuahua will prove that surprisingly well…along with a few other things.  I’ll begrudgingly admit, this one had some charm, at least in the beginning, but it quickly squandered that charm by being preachy in the extreme.

When a spoiled Beverly Hills dog–yes, a chihuahua, hence the title–winds up captured by dognappers in Mexico, she’s desperate to make her way back to Beverly Hills.  She’ll run afoul of con men and vicious gangster dogs…and their masters, who desperately want to get their hands on her diamond collar from Harry Winston.  But she won’t be alone—her temporary mistress, a landscaper, and an amorous Chihuahua named Papi are all out to recover her before she can be captured by any of her various pursuers.

Now, there’s a LOT of charm in this movie.  The dogs are downright adorable and the scripting is fast and punchy with lots of solidly quotable lines to enjoy.  The bad guys even do a pretty fair job of projecting menace, and that’s pretty rare for a kids’ movie, even a Disney movie.

Here’s the downside—they’re going to blow a lot of this charm on cheesy “messages”, including the evils of dog fighting and the value of compassion and the evils of being / owning  a purse dog and suchlike.  I’ve heard enough of THAT kind of ranting from PETA, thanks much—but even in the midst of all that pointless preachy prattling, there’s also a lot to like here, even if they went a little heavy on the Mexican accents.

And okay, let’s be really, really painfully honest here—the whole “bark” thing in the abandoned Aztec ruins is about as unlikely as these sort of Disney endings get—but it’s no less exciting to see.  Disney movies have never really been about rationality and plausibility—things like “making sense” and “being possible” have never had much impact on the Disney world.

Beverly Hills Chihuahua is actually much like its namesake, even how they described it.  It’s small, it’s inoffensive, it may not be really much to look at but it’s still got a lot of fight and a lot of charm.  In fact, even the quote the movie supplied a quote that actually describes itself surprisingly well: it’s tiny, but it’s mighty.  It’s cheap, it’s packed with plenty of schmaltzy Disney sentimentality…as movies go, it’s downright tiny. It’s a SMALL movie, a NOTHING movie, a movie lacking in any real significance or lasting value.  I’ll probably forget I saw it tomorrow.  But for the ninety minutes that I saw it, it was mighty, in its little way—it’s cheap, it’s packed with plenty of schmaltzy Disney sentimentality, and it brought more than a few smiles with it.

So for a pointless piece of fluff that’ll probably make you happy for ninety minutes out of your life, you could do worse than Beverly Hills Chihuahua.