Aaahh!! Middle-aged monsters

Dracula and his flunkies in a scene from "Hotel Transylvania 2." Image courtesy Sony Pictures Animation.

Monsters aren’t quite as scary as they used to be, at least in the universe of “Hotel Transylvania 2.” The beasts and creatures that went bump through the night have instead become celebrities, their images turned into advertisements for stale Halloween cereal and their motivation for terrifying locals dissipated. For these monsters, it’s more convenient and more profitable to slouch around lethargically than to menace an entire village; the profit margin for option two never seemed to justify the energy expended anyway.

So how does one portray monsters that no longer need to scare and aren’t really capable of doing it so well anyway? The answer for the people responsible “Hotel Transylvania 2” is to have them whine and moan and break into dance to recently faded pop hits for reasons related less to creative intrigue and more to stretching the remnants of an underwritten film.

That’s kind of funny, as there could have been plenty of material had the filmmakers spread out the machinations of the first act a little more. “Hotel Transylvania 2's” runtime, per IMDB, is approximately 89 minutes, and the movie runs through six years of material within the first 15 minutes. And a whole lot happens in the first 15 minutes: the reintroduction of hotel owner and vampire Dracula (Adam Sandler, combining a few accents from his “Saturday Night Live” days); the wedding between Dracula’s daughter Mavis (Selena Gomez) to human slacker Jonathan (Andy Samberg); a pregnancy that results in the birth of grandson Dennis (Asher Blinkoff); and glimpses of the first four-plus years of the boy's life. The closest approximation to conflict that exists in this film is tied to the young boy’s potential to either remain a human or turn into a creature of the night; according to the film, the boy has until the age of five to grow his fangs and go full vampire. Mavis is set to move Dennis and Jonathan away from the hotel if the young lad doesn’t develop into Nosferatu II.

Hopefully he'd be a hint more fetching than this fellow.

Dracula, being a bigoted jerk, tries his darndest to ensure the boy’s nature leans more vampiric than human. He recruits a few monster friends (Kevin James' Frankenstein's monster, Keegan-Michael Key's mummy, Steve Buscemi's werewolf, and David Spade's invisible man) to teach Dennis the ropes of monsterdom, but the attempt is terrifically unsuccessful. The last resort is for Dracula to maybe, possibly accept his grandson for who he is; that logical plan is kyboshed when Dracula's human-hating, über-traditional father, Vlad (Mel Brooks), tries to scare the fangs into poor Dennis. Again, not the best of ideas, especially after bat-creature Bela (Rob Riggle) takes things a little too far. There’s also a side plot in which Mavis gets a sneak peek into life outside of the hotel and monster world when she visits Jonathan's parents (Megan Mullally and Nick Offerman) in California, but it is a bit underdeveloped. 

At least it brings Ron and Tammy back into our lives.

Many a lesson is (supposedly) learned about accepting others and rejecting bigotry (both humans and monsters fall into some anti-species behavior) in all its forms, at least until the ending undermines that lesson and lets Dracula off the hook. “Hotel Transylvania” remains an Adam Sandler film (he wrote it alongside longtime SNL scribe Robert Smigel), and Adam Sandler characters are always proven right in the end no matter how awful they act in the minutes leading to the third act. So, yes, Dracula drops his grandson off the top of a very high tower just to see if the kid starts to fly on his own, and he continuously violates the trust of his daughter for purely selfish reasons, and it takes him an entire film to maybe, possibly accepts his grandson for who he is. (Something his ultra-scary father does within about 10 minutes.) But, again, he’s the good guy because his intentions aren’t entirely bad, and he at least catches the poor boy before he splits his head open.

This is lazy thinking from a lazy man whose hands are all over this film, including numerous dance scenes (Dracula at one point dances with his cape to Flo Rida's “GDFR” because why not) and jokes that continue forever without going anywhere, both of which do serve the purpose of getting the film into the precipice of the 90-minute mark. The humor that exists beyond the filler material is more often than not tepid, with little urgency or agency to the one-liners and jokes.

Yet there are a couple of jokes that do land – among them a killer toss-away one liner I gather came from Smigel's strange mind – and the screening of “Hotel Transylvania 2” did feature few, if any, crying children in the seats. So the film at least succeeds at the bare minimum for any animated film aimed at children, but at least one film this summer showed cartoon flicks can do much more than that with at least a modicum of effort put into it.

Review: Two out of Five Stars

Click here to see the trailer.

Rating: PG

Run time: 89 minutes (One hour and 29 minutes)

Genre: Animation

Ask Away

Target audience: Families and any Adam Sandler fans left after “Pixels.”

Take the whole family?: The film gets surprisingly violent toward the end, so keep the kiddos younger than 6 away.

Theater or Netflix?: Feel free to stay at home and wait if you must watch it.

Whither Genndy Tartakovsky?:  The one person involved in this film deserving of some pity is director Genndy Tartakovsky, whose hands are tied by Smigel and Sandler's lackluster script. The man behind three of Cartoon Network's best animated shows (“Powerpuff Girls,” “Samurai Jack” and “Dexter's Laboratory”) has a quirky sense of humor rooted in optimism and fatalism, along with a keen eye for a good fight sequence. With a little luck he’ll get another project, this time with greater creative control over the proceedings.

                                     Reason No. 7 why the '90s didn't completely suck.

Watch this instead?: This is a perfect opportunity to advocate once again for one of my favorite animated films of this decade, “ParaNorman.”