It all goes back to two lessons that Hollywood should've learned last decade (if not sooner). The first is that you don't always get what you pay for; in this case, that applies to the John-Rice musical numbers, which (aside from the soaring title track) are unmemorable and frequently run The Road to El Dorado into a dead end. The second lesson is that the script is all, especially when dealing with the rigid assembly line of animation development, where there's no such thing as a reshoot.

In fact, if you're looking for what's wrong with The Road to El Dorado, start with its medium. The movie is set up as a simple adventure story, wherein two Spanish con men (voiced by Branagh and Kline) happen upon the fabled lost city of gold and are treated as gods by the natives. The story is meant to ape The Man Who Would Be King and the Hope/Crosby "Road" pictures, with a dollop of smart-alecky Looney Tunes slapstick.

But what made Looney Tunes work, to a great extent, was the flat, non-Disneyfied look of the cartoon artwork. The more elaborate the animation--and DreamWorks is more elaborate than Disney at this point--the less freedom the audience feels to cut loose. Comedy isn't meant to be pretty, and talented animators with a gift for gilding shouldn't be spending years of their lives on light entertainment. Leave that to the TV people, who can give delightful animated shows like The Powerpuff Girls and Spongebob Squarepants the kind of gutter energy that this kind of cartoon needs.

Is The Road to El Dorado entertaining? Yes, by and large. Kline and Branagh make a great, theatrical comedy team--even if their sensuous romping through the jungle reminds one of Mark Rappaport's brilliant dissection of the homosexual subtext to Bob Hope and Bing Crosby's on-screen relationship. And there are several breathtaking action sequences, although the movie bogs down in El Dorado itself, where the natives' reaction to our heroes never quite makes sense. It's a good junk-food movie. But when good junk food is being served by four-star chefs, one can't help but feel a little cheated.