Hotel Transylvania 2 movie review (2015)
This time out, Adam Sandler co-writes with returning joke meister Robert Smigel. That Smigel sired Triumph, the Insult Comic Dog pretty much earns him a lifetime pass from me, even if this subpar sequel barely comes close to being as amusing as any run-of-the-mill “Munsters” TV episode. For Sandler, however, this is not-so-funny business as usual.
So what is the plot, you might be frightened to ask? Dracula’s daughter Mavis (Selena Gomez) weds her human beau Jonathan (Andy Samberg) and the hotel opens its doors to mere mortals for the first time in the form of her in-laws (Megan Mullally and Nick Offerman, pocketing a paycheck). She gives birth to a son, Dennis, who sports a chrysanthemum bush of red curls. Or, as meddlesome Papa Drac likes to call him, “Denisovich.”
The rest of this anemic mixed-marriage soap opera pivots on whether Dennis will grow up to be a chip off the old bat (his granddad hopes he is just “a late fanger”) and if Mavis will decide to move her brood to sunny California, even if she doesn’t know “Santa Claus” from “Santa Cruz.” To speed up matters, Dracula takes his grandson along with several of his ghoulish buddies, including Steve Buscemi’s Wolfman, Kevin James as Frankenstein and David Spade’s Invisible Man, on a road trip to the same vampire summer camp he attended to get training.
If this all sounds rather dull, that is because it is.
Judging by the youngsters in the crowd, all this boo-ha-ha failed to produce non-stop hilarity as director Genndy Tartakovsky once again relies on manic slapstick gags that rarely summon all but the briefest of chuckles. The kids seemed most pleased by a nearly mute green tub of jiggly goo known as Blobby, who can suck up random objects like squirrels into his tummy and urinate with multiple streams.
I kept myself preoccupied by trying to mine some good in the bad, although having to sit through the lamest Count Chocula reference ever made it difficult. Gomez’s youthful delivery is refreshing amidst the horror shtick. I like hearing Buscemi’s deadpan coming out of a beast who can’t control his animal instincts. I didn’t mind Jon Lovitz, who previously spoke for Quasimodo, doing a riff on the Phantom of the Opera as a kind of Greek chorus.
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