Hotel Transylvania 2
is the sort of movie that’ll satisfy some in the audience some of the
time, but will satisfy no one all the time. It’s one of those cheerlessly and
mercenarily divided family films where the jokes for parents and the jokes for
their kids are completely separate. We get a joke about a butt, then a
throwaway gag referencing childproofing. We get a joke about new parents
needing alone time, then a joke about a zombie falling off a cliff. It’s broad
in both cases, reaching for easy jokes and lazily winding its way down a set of
obvious stereotypes. In its cartoony way it at least proves it’s willing to
pander to everyone equally. But when I see Genndy Tartakovsky’s name in the credits,
and think back to the great cartoons he’s been involved with – Dexter’s Laboratory, The Powerpuff Girls, Samurai Jack, Star Wars: Clone Wars – it’s hard not to
wish this monster mash was more. This movie somehow doesn’t allow him the room
to show off his visual pop, expressive action imagery, and effective all-ages
plotting. It is dull, repetitive, and infantilizing.
It’s all too slack and aimless, the talented computer
animators at Sony Animation finding nothing new to say in a world already
fairly exhausted of potential last time. It picks up where the first Hotel Transylvania ended, with the cute
vampire girl (Selena Gomez) having fallen in love with a dopey human boy (Andy
Samberg) while her protective father (Adam Sandler) grew to be okay with it.
Except he’s still harboring anti-human sentiments that doesn’t go away during
the opening wedding, or through a few time jumps that bring him a grandson (Asher
Blinkoff). See, the little kid with his big doe eyes and curly red hair is just
too human for his grandpa’s (vam-pa’s)
liking. Why, if the kid doesn’t sprout his fangs by his fifth birthday, he
might be totally human. The vampa would be sad not to have his vampire genes
passed on, but worse the kid might have to go live in the human world instead
of a soft slapstick monster hotel. What’s a grandpa to do?
The screenplay by Sandler and Robert Smigel uses the
monster/human tension to stage a too-cutesy metaphor for prejudice of all
kinds. The boy’s parents will be okay letting their son be whoever he was born
to be, but grandpa’s slow on the uptake. He conspires to sneak the kid out on a
road trip with Frankenstein (Kevin James), The Mummy (Keegan-Michael Key), The
Invisible Man (David Spade), The Wolfman (Steve Buscemi), and a gelatinous
green blob. They go through the countryside showing the boy how much fun it is
to be a monster, but because they’re all buffoons they actually show how
irresponsible and soft they’ve become. A stop at a vampire camp is a weird
crotchety skewering of overprotective parenting. Are we supposed to be on the
monsters’ side when they scoff at sweet campfire songs and roll their eyes at a
condemned tower the campers aren’t allowed to play on? Seems fine to me. Later,
after the monsters collapse said tower and set the camp on fire, the counselor accuses
them of child endangerment. Uh. Yeah.
All of this is in service of an obvious message to respect
others’ differences and accept people’s identities no matter what. They were
born this way. It’s a nice moral, and I guess there’s enough zipping around and
potty humor to hold kids’ attention. But it’s both too adult and too childish,
unable to find a good middle ground between limp slapstick shenanigans, loose
sight gags, loud pop music, mild riffs on monster iconography, and what the
MPAA might call “thematic material.” By the time Mel Brooks shows up as great
vampa Vlad, wheezing in his recognizable exaggerated old man voice (which has only
grown more authentic as the years pass) it’s clearly a movie haphazardly aiming
at too many demographics to work. It’s just an uninspired attempt to milk more
cash out of a hit. How else to explain the prominently displayed Sony brand
cell phones the characters use? It’s not every day you see an animated movie
with product placement.
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