Hotel Transylvania 2 Review
PG: Scary Images, Mild Action, and Rude Humor
Columbia Pictures, Sony PIctures Animation
1 hr and 87 MInutes
Voice Cast: Adam Sandler, Selena Gomez, Andy Samberg, Mel Brooks, Kevin James, Keegan Michael Key, David Spade, Steve Buscemi, Megan Mullally, Nick Offerman, Fran Drescher, Molly Shannon, Dana Carvey, with Rob Riggle, and Asher Blinkoff
Editor’s Note: This review was originally published during my adolescence. Outdated language might be seen in these old posts. Since then, my thoughts and values have grown. This review is being presented as they were originally written, grammatical errors, shitty sentence structure, and typos galore. Because to do otherwise would be that same as claiming these flaws never existed.
BACKSTORY: Saturday September 19th I go to a early morning screening of Hotel Transylvania 2 at 10 IN THE MORNING! If it wasn't for the free tickets/bags/popcorn and food they were giving out I...still would've gone.
STORYLINE: Everything seems to be changing for the better at Hotel Transylvania... Dracula's rigid monster-only hotel policy has finally relaxed, opening up its doors to human guests. But behind closed coffins, Drac is worried that his adorable half-human, half-vampire grandson, Dennis, isn't showing signs of being a vampire. So while Mavis is busy visiting her human in-laws with Johnny - and in for a major cultural shock of her own - "Vampa" Drac enlists his friends Frank, Murray, Wayne and Griffin to put Dennis through a "monster-in-training" boot camp. But little do they know that Drac's grumpy and very old, old, old school dad Vlad is about to pay a family visit to the hotel. And when Vlad finds out that his great-grandson is not a pure blood - and humans are now welcome at Hotel Transylvania - things are going to get batty!
REVIEW: In 2012 most audiences loved Hotel Transylvania including me and were so convinced this was Adam Sandler's role back to form. It is now 2015 and I have a new memo for animated sequels. If you have a film that has nothing to say, but just keep shelling jokes then just fuck off. As an audience we should be tired of animated sequels that doesn't provide much story but just cheap gags to get a laugh out of you. We gave Despicable Me 2 a pass, because it still manage to provide a cute story while maintaining creativity. In Hotel Transylvania 2 you have nothing but jokes and Family Guy type cutaways, but with cringing pop culture references throughout. The first film didn't use much pop culture jokes, but now we get jokes referring to selfies, Batman, Sesame Street, and most of out of nowhere dance sequences or jokes referring to modern pop music. There is a joke where Fifth Harmony's "Worth It" is playing in Drac's car with his friends dancing to it in the background and when he turns it off Frankenstein goes "come on everybody likes that song." After a joke like that marketing a pop group's song you are bound to get infuriated. Which makes it worse is that it is a group signed on by Sony Records. Throughout this film every product around the monsters has nothing but the Sony brand on it. Phones, Computer, TV, everything! We get this is a Sony film, stop marketing your fucking products in the movie. Watching these Sony movies are becoming more of a commercial than actual feature films and this film is a prime example of it. As far as characters go, there is barely any development into this. This film is set 7 years after the first one and there is no aging or growth in the animation of Mavis or Johnny but only for their son Dennis. There are even moments you really can't buy Johnny being a father to Dennis because of his immature "EXTREME" personality. He still forgets that Mavis is his wife. There are new characters introduced such as Offerman/Mullally as Johnny's parents and Mel Brooks as Drac's dad, but as much you want to see more of them, they're barely around especially Brooks who appears around the last 20 minutes of the film. The biggest idea that the film dropped the ball on was a sequence of the characters going to a vampire camp with other vampire children. We spent our entire time focusing on two vampires in this film that the fact we see plenty more is something you would like to see the filmmakers go in depth with. NOPE! You don't get any of that at all. The best thing out of that sequence is just a tongue in cheek joke of a camp instructor named Dana and is voiced by Dana Carvey. As badly as this film is written (thanks Sandler for that), there are a lot of funny visual gags that hit you hard. There are plenty laugh out loud moments that are consistently hilarious. If the film isn't doing a bad pop culture joke, the cute and innocent jokes work really well that it still have you laughing for two more scenes.
LAST STATEMENT: It may be consistently funny at times and still a fun voice cast, but the amount of laziness in the screenplay and fucking product placements mixed with pop culture humor makes Hotel Transylvania 2 another cinematic failure for Sony.
Seriously Sony get your shit together.
Rating: 2/5 | 43%
Super Scene: Camp Vampire
