THE film is “Beverly Hills Chihuahua.” The audience is the fire hydrant.
She’s Chloe (voiced by Drew Barrymore), the best-dressed bitch since Donatella Versace. She’s got sequined pillbox hats, doggie fashion spectacles and a perverted admirer: the Mexican gardener’s dog, another Chihuahua (George Lopez). He offers his services “if you ever need someone to lick inside your ears or chew the hard-to-reach places,” which sounds a bit racy even for two panting animals who met on Nerve.
One of Chloe’s friends is a debauched pug named Sebastian who wears Naughty Highway Patrolman aviator glasses and says “faboo” a lot. “Gay Pug”: much better idea for a movie.
Chloe is cute, but it’s hard to feel for her. In a month when dog food is starting to look like a possible dinner option for middle-class humans, the pooch gets lost because she refuses to eat Alpo at the hotel in Mexico where her owner’s niece (Piper Perabo) takes her along for a girls’ weekend trip. “Uh, I’m starting to get the feeling there’s no Four Seasons here,” says Chloe. She scampers into the night looking for haute cuisine wearing designer doggie booties.
More suspense could have been worked up on a trip to China, where Chloe would look less like a fashion plate and more like the appetizer that’s served on it. Instead, she is merely captured by a dog-fighting ring and thrown in a kennel with a gang of tough-looking strays: ruff-ians.
“I’m an heiress,” she explains. “A hairless?” asks another dog. A Doberman chases her, trying to steal her diamond collar for his nasty owner, and only the most stony-hearted viewer could fail to root for the underdog: the Doberman.
Helping her flee is a German shepherd (Andy Garcia) with a past: He and the Doberman have sniffed each other out before. Not lately, though, at least on the shepherd’s part: He’s the second major big-screen character in less than a year to have been stricken smell-blind by a traumatic event. (The first was Dewey Cox in “Walk Hard,” who became nasally impaired after witnessing his brother being stricken by “one of the worst cases of being cut in half by a machete I’ve ever seen.”)
Meanwhile, Chloe’s would-be boyfriend, the Chihuahua-gardener, is trying to rescue her. “We’re Mexican!” he says. “Not Mexican’t!”
You expect Chloe to learn a lesson, and she does, but not the one you’d expect. When she announces that she’s no longer a priss, she does so while wearing a spangled doggie jacket and diamond accessories.
The real lesson is the one she learns when she falls in with a group of radical Chihuahua liberationists whose angry motto is “No mas!” and who indoctrinate Chloe into a revisionist history of the glories of her race. This is the weirdest scene in the movie, and consequently the only interesting one. It’s as if it were directed by a four-legged Spike Lee.
BEVERLY HILLS CHIHUAHUA
K-90210.
Running time: 90 minutes. Rated PG (mildly crude humor). At the E-Walk, the Magic Johnson, the Orpheum, others.