PAW Patrol Dino Movie Review: Dogs, Dinos, Diamond Heist
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- PAW Patrol: The Dino Movie strands Ryder and the pups on a dinosaur-populated island after a storm during a sea patrol, where they rescue Rex, a paraplegic dog who has lived there for two years and built a gadget-filled treehouse without wifi.
- Mayor Humdinger (voiced by Ron Pardo) serves as the villain, learning of the island's natural diamond reserves and bringing accomplices plus dynamite to exploit them, polluting the prelapsarian paradise with a rusted jalopy.
- The review criticizes the film's politics as 'muddled,' arguing the dogs escape moral blame for alerting authorities and 'selling out' their fellow animals to news stations, while embracing shiny modern gadgetry — a 'simplistic, macho, borderline libertarian worldview at odds with its environmentalism.'
- Marshall, the firefighting Dalmatian voiced by Carter Young, steps into main character duties and gets a hint of character development as he rises to save dogs and dinos from Humdinger's environmentally catastrophic greed.
- Ed Sheeran wrote 'Bottle Up,' a new song performed by the Backstreet Boys — a 'freebie' aimed at millennial and late Gen-Z parents enduring another franchise installment.
- The animation draws praise for vivid storm rendering and jungle sequences reminiscent of 'Sleeping Beauty'-era Disney and 'Kensuke's Kingdom,' but criticism for 'plastic, uncanny-valley' character designs the reviewer likens to 'yassified Lassies with branded hard-hats.'
Why it matters: The review frames 'The Dino Movie' as a step up in ambition for a franchise whose toy-driven economics have shaped its storytelling — the film expands to an island setting and apocalyptic stakes, but its inability to critique its own techno-heroic worldview undermines the environmentalist messaging it sells to preschool-age audiences and the parents who buy the merch.
