Monster Cash (Grab): HOTEL TRANSYLVANIA 2

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.

Space Invaders: PIXELS

Eighties nostalgia is weaponized in Pixels, a light sci-fi comedy that sees unknown aliens send giant arcade games to invade the earth. Why? Apparently they picked up some thirty-year-old signals and they took it as a threat. The attacks start with an enormous Galaga game raining destruction on an Air Force base in Guam, reducing everything in sight to glowing piles of multicolored blocks. It’s clearly a crisis for bumbling President Kevin James, who was once just a kid in an arcade cheering on his good buddies in their quest to be champion gamers. Now he’s a buffoon no one likes, with plummeting approval ratings. How he got to be president in the first place is anyone’s guess. And now there are these aliens threatening to destroy the planet. What follows is a nonsense adventure out to flatter every nerd in the audience for merely recognizing the references.

James recruits a goofy and improbable ensemble to fight back the aliens in elaborate large-scale replications of classic games. He finds his old arcade pals – now an AV technician (Adam Sandler), a conspiracy nut (Josh Gad), and a prisoner (Peter Dinklage, looking like Billy Mitchell) – and forces them to train Marines in video game strategy. The gruff general (Brian Cox) is hopelessly confused, but reluctantly lets a lieutenant (Michelle Monaghan) get special tech prepared surprisingly quickly. Soon the dweebs and the military have giant phallic laser guns blasting away at Space Invaders, Centipede, and the like as aliens demand three contests, winner takes planet. If you already find yourself asking questions like, “How?” or “Why?” or “Who cares?” this is not your movie.

The nerds, we’re told repeatedly, are the only ones who know how to play the games, and therefore the world’s only hope. This seems to me a misunderstanding of video games’ popularity. You’d think a group of Marines would know a thing or two about joystick-eye coordination, and could grasp the basic strategy of these old games, especially since it boils down in practice to shooting at large glowing objects. Plus, it sets up a dated nerds-rule/jocks-drool underdog fight that doesn’t make sense in our world of unfortunately male-dominated Silicon Valley and other bro-ish tech enclaves where the simple power categories of dorks and sports have scrambled. But I suppose this isn’t exactly the movie to go looking for logic or coherence. It doesn’t even bother to show us the aliens behind the DayGlo lightshow attacks, expecting us to enjoy the sight of it all while chuckling at its cast’s antics and not thinking about it too much.

The movie’s idea of nerds is as old as the games they’re fighting. But the action is rather well done, like a lighthearted riff on a Transformers plot structure in which incomprehensible extraterrestrial conflict tears through some major cities and their landmarks. I enjoyed seeing the vibrant geometric shapes colliding with earthbound obstacles. At least it is action different from what we usually see, collateral damage chaos smashing apart solid matter into bits of glowing blocks. There’s some charm to seeing a towering Pac-Man chomping through a maze of New York City streets, or cavernous red alien scaffolding arranging itself into a King Kong-sized Donkey Kong setup. But it goes on and on without feelings of real danger, and the characters just aren’t funny or interesting enough to earn our investment.

Remaking a French short film by Patrick Jean, writers Tim Herlihy and Timothy Dowling (frequent Sandler collaborators) create podgy connective tissue for silly spectacle in the form of limp childish comedy and halfhearted relationships. The jokes largely fall flat, without a sharp sense of perspective or humor. We’re supposed to care if these guys earn validation despite learning little more than that they’re good at thirty-year-old video games. And it’s yet another movie where goofy guys stumble their way to greatness while patient women stand next to the fun, scowling or smirking. This one goes the extra mile, casting people like Jane Krakowski, Ashley Benson, and Serena Williams (!) to show up in a few scenes and smile, like prizes to be won or symbols to be displayed. Playing into pessimistic nerd culture inferiority and resentment, the movie sets itself up as wish-fulfillment for people who wish playing arcade games could be enough to 1.) earn a living, 2.) make you an important public figure, and 3.) get you ladies to objectify.

So the human stakes are unconvincing and vaguely insulting. But at least the zippy adventure moments largely work. It’s not an altogether unpleasant experience, which most definitely cannot be said for most Sandler comedies of late. The director here is Chris Columbus, whose work on the first two Harry Potter films shows his facility with bouncy effects work and convincing design. He has a competent eye for faux-Spielberg awe and workmanlike entertainment, and proves once more that, when given a director instead of an enabler, Sandler is a decent everyman. As a schlub shooting 8-bit aliens, we can almost believe it. The problem is only when he stands next to painfully wisecracking sidekicks, or when we’re asked to care if he gets to woo the lady in uniform, win over her moppet, and get the respect of the world. When the movie’s in motion, it goes down easily. But then it stops, and there’s that hollow aftertaste.

Who Blarted? PAUL BLART: MALL COP 2

It has been six years since Paul Blart: Mall Cop, a dull and silly Die Hard-in-a-mall comedy starring Kevin James, was a surprise hit. Never underestimate the box office potential of a January release date and an ad campaign in which a likable everyman falls down a lot. Was there a vast amount of untapped story potential in this concept? No. Did Sony think the box office results of the first would mean there was some small, lingering affection from audiences to be converted into easy money if a sequel was done on the cheap? Yes. So. Here we are. Dumb comedies get dumber, repetitive sequels all the time. Here’s another.

In the first Paul Blart, the big, pathetic security guard bumbled his way into saving his mall of employment from robbers. The new Blart is Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2, instead of something like 2 Paul 2 Blart or Paul Blart: The Quickening or Paul Blart 2 the Streets. It takes the man away from his mall to a national convention of security guards in Las Vegas, where he and his daughter (Raini Rodriguez) eventually stumble upon a heist in progress and, surprise surprise, must protect the hotel. It’s another indifferently staged, overlit, lazily photographed underdog story of a guy no one likes somehow saving the day. The bland heist plot is played totally straight (Neal McDonough is the baddie) and everything else is theoretically amusing, but I’m not sure where or why. At one point Blart wrestles a bird. Later, he sees a guy eat a rotten banana. Huh.

Completely predictable and totally devoid of anything resembling a laugh, the empty, mindless movie left me with just one question. Is it better to have no jokes than bad jokes? Scene after scene passed by without any discernable punchlines, sight gags, or stupid asides. I just kept wondering why no one wrote jokes. Surely someone at some point would’ve seen dailies or a rough cut and gone back for reshoots or ADR that could punch up the airless and endless scenes. I mean, you could’ve at least gotten a Foley artist for some last minute flatulence and slide whistles. It still wouldn’t be funny, but at least there’d be something. It’s so lazily slapped together by director Andy Fickman, limply plotted by Nick Bakay and James himself, that it’s best viewed as a paycheck for all involved. And you don’t have to see it for the checks to clear.

By the end, pummeled by the total nothingness of the events on screen, I decided I was thankful no one tried too hard to make this movie funny, if only for the irritation I felt whenever I faintly detected the presence of humorous intent. Every beat is geared towards making Blart a pathetic figure of scorn. I think it’s supposed to make him sympathetic, but most running jokes are built on the premise that anyone who likes him is stupid or ridiculous. That’s not funny. It’s sad, like when his mother is killed off in the opening scene, run over by a speeding truck. Laughing yet? In one scene Blart gets into a fight with his daughter in a restaurant. She’s angry he’s overprotective. He’s eating the crunchiest bread ever baked. It goes something like this. She: “You never listen!” He: Munch. Munch. Munch. Laughing now?

Isn’t it hilarious that he has relationship problems, his mom was run over, his daughter’s pulling away, and he has problems with food? And no one likes him except other condescendingly presented oddballs, and even then only sometimes? There’s nothing that deserves a moment’s thought beyond relief the movie does, indeed, end. But there’s nagging ugliness – scenes glorifying use of force (Tasers, beanbag guns, and a vibrating fork) to take down suspects, a man policing his daughter’s love life above and beyond what’s appropriate, and an implication that fat people should only interact with other fat people – that’s not just empty, stupid, and unfunny, but leaves a nasty aftertaste, too. I saw the movie in a theater with the quietest audience I’ve ever heard. We sat there silently for 90 minutes, then glumly filed out.

Monster Mush: HOTEL TRANSYLVANIA

You might not know it based only on the evidence of Hotel Transylvania, but Genndy Tartakovsky is one of the best animators of his generation. People around my age, especially, will recognize his powerful influence over his field if I mention the titles Dexter’s Laboratory, Powerpuff Girls, and Samurai Jack, three popular and influential animated series he directed for Cartoon Network in the 90s and early 00s. Characterized by fast, expressive movements and crisp, clean, caricatured figures moving through bold, colorful landscapes, these 2D, largely hand-drawn, shows play like they spring fully formed from a consistent, energetic vision.

But now, to the film at hand: Tartakovsky’s feature film debut. It’s a three-dimensional computer animated comedy about Dracula not wanting his daughter Mavis to leave the monster hotel he built to keep her away from dangerous humans. It’s clear that something went wrong during the making of Hotel Transylvania. You can tell by the gorgeous watercolor concept art that serves as a backdrop for the end credits. There’s certainly nothing that entrancingly good-looking in the film itself, a bland overly-familiar CGI animation effort that feels colorful and plastic in predictable patterns, where wacky character design looks like nothing more than a basket of McDonald’s toys. I like how broadly caricatured famous monsters like the mummy and Frankenstein look here, but they’re really only good for a sight gag or two before growing boring. Gone are Tartakovsky’s instantly recognizable drawings, subsumed in a cookie-cutter computer environment, his bold expressive 2D style ironically flattened out and homogenized in 3D.

The more-or-less one-joke plot (attributed to five writers) is as follows. A human wanders into Hotel Transylvania (a huge Scooby-Doo­-style castle) and catches the eye of Mavis, so Dracula tries in vain to keep the human away from the castle in order to protect his daughter from falling in love and to maintain his business model, which is built upon assuring the guests, monsters all, that humans are A.) universally dangerous and B.) never to be found on the grounds. The plot has thinning issues, growing less complicated as it goes along, settling far too easily into predictable grooves of narrative along paths that have been well trod. Stranger still are the moments when it eschews predictability to ill effect. Why not play around with the received pop-culture assumptions about these famous monsters? Why not go out on a rousing cover of “The Monster Mash?”

Voices heard here are grating, frenzied explosions of mismatched celebrity voices. As Dracula, Adam Sandler commits to one of his infamous grating accents, this time around a broad, sloppy Bela Lugosi vant-to-suck-your-blud style of loud mumbling. On the other end of the spectrum is Selena Gomez as daughter Mavis, who seems to have perhaps literally phoned in her lines in her normal speaking voice. The human who gets mixed up in door-slamming, pay-no-attention-to-the-guy-who’s-clearly-not-a-monster shenanigans is Andy Samberg who does a broad SoCal drawl. Elsewhere, cartoony monsters can be heard speaking like Steve Buscemi, CeeLo, Kevin James, Molly Shannon, Fran Drescher, David Spade, and Jon Lovitz. Weird, huh? Distracting too.

Hotel Transylvania is a movie both manic and sleepy, racing through turbocharged sub-Looney Tunes concepts so quickly and constantly that none of the gags have time to land, assuming they ever could have done so. I don’t know. When I see Frankenstein detach his legs and walk them behind the mummy to unleash a stinky blast of flatulence that is then sucked up by a witch with a bellows who then proceeds to use it to stoke a fire, I’m just not amused. Maybe that means I wasn’t on the right wavelength for this picture, but I tried. I really did. I like fast and silly, but this movie’s so much of both that it skips off the tracks and lands with a disappointing thud on the same old tracks we’ve been down hundreds of times before. Gee, parents and kids should better understand each other. People should not be hated for being different. It’s all wacky jokes, pleasant enough, but not too funny, in service of all the usual morals. That’s fine as far as that goes, but if you don’t have anything new to say, at least you could say it in an entertaining way.

Funny Business: THE DILEMMA

The funniest thing about The Dilemma is that, despite being sold as director Ron Howard’s return to comedy, it’s not very funny. In fact, every time it tries to be funny in a broad, silly way, it falls embarrassingly flat. The comedy seems jammed up into the corners of a somewhat serious drama. If it weren’t for all the straining for laughs in Allan Loeb’s screenplay, this could be a much better film.

It stars Vince Vaughn as a man who plans on proposing to his longtime girlfriend (Jennifer Connelly), following the advice of his happily married best friend (Kevin James). As he scopes out the perfect spot to pop the question, a lovely botanical garden, he notices his friend’s wife (Winona Ryder) making out with some younger guy (Channing Tatum). He takes it upon himself to learn more and ends up sneaking around town peeping in windows and trying desperately to avoid revealing anything before he’s sure of all the facts.

Now saddled with secrets and questions, he squirms about and ends up making each and every social situation more and more difficult as he struggles under the pressure of being the only person in the room tuned in to all of the nasty subtext. So many comedies draw their laughs from the unspoken comedic tensions between characters, that it’s strange, but not entirely unpleasant, to see one throw away the comedy to focus solely on the tension.

After wading through deadly dull scenes of formulaic comedy windup, especially a nonstarter of a subplot involving an awfully miscalculated use of Queen Latifah, things get interesting. For the majority of its runtime, the film functions well as a compelling, wild-eyed melodrama, a darkly depressing look into seemingly normal relationships with deep dysfunction hidden just below the surface. Funnily enough, there are some genuine laughs found amidst the pleasurably agonizing drama in sequences of acute social discomfort. As the web of secrets that supports these characters’ interactions grows more prominent, the romances and friendships involved threaten to collapse altogether.

And then, the movie deflates the tension quickly and clumsily. Tension falls away in favor of a queasily pat and tonally odd ending that feels like it belongs to the opening attempts at comedy instead of the moments it follows. It’s a movie that recovers very nicely from an opening stumble only to fall back into the same traps by the end.