![]() (They broke the monster gun.)ĭrac and Johnny’s journey through the rainforest is filled with fun gags, many of them built around Johnny gradually discovering his monster powers and Drac gradually discovering his human limitations. (Van Helsing has a special monster gun.) In the ensuing chaos, Johnny is turned into an enormous dragon, Dracula is turned into a balding, middle-aged, out-of-shape human, and the two of them head to an unnamed South American country to locate the magic gem that powers the broken monster gun. Johnny, frustrated that Dracula will never accept him, enlists the aid of Professor Van Helsing (once the villain of the previous movie, now just a guy who hangs out in Dracula’s basement) to turn him into a monster using a special monster gun. But when Drac’s secret spills out and Johnny gets a little too excited, the Count decides he can’t relinquish the hotel he spent more than a century building to his irritating son-in-law. The new picture begins with Dracula celebrating his hotel’s 125th anniversary with a secret plan to announce that he is retiring and handing the business over to Mavis (and, somewhat reluctantly, to her klutzy and annoyingly overenthusiastic human husband Johnny, still voiced by Andy Samberg). A series partly defined by the easygoing charm of Sandler’s half-hearted voice work (remember, this is a character whose catchphrase is “Bleh, bleh, bleh”) now has someone trying very hard to imitate Sandler’s half-hearted voice work. The result feels like a serviceable imitation of something that was already a serviceable imitation of a real movie. Director Tartakovsky, too, is no longer behind the proverbial camera, though he retains a screenplay and an executive producer credit. Kevin James, who voiced Dracula’s good pal, the klutzy Frankenstein, has also left, replaced by Brad Abrell. Maybe because Sandler himself isn’t even there to begin with: He’s been replaced by impressionist comedian Brian Hull, who voiced the character in an earlier Hotel Transylvania short. ![]() It feels less like an animated romp among Sandler and his buddies and more like the paycheck gig it probably always was. The fourth entry in the series, Hotel Transylvania: Transformania (out now on Amazon Prime Video, so your kids don’t even need you to take them anymore) mostly sticks to that established formula, though it’s hard not to feel like the dutifulness that always loomed over the previous films has now fully taken over the enterprise. You could watch them with your kids and not feel your soul corroding into dust. The Hotel Transylvania movies made sure nobody would ever mistake them for an Oscar-bound Pixar classic, but they weren’t entirely without heart, either. Over the years, the ongoing efforts of Sandler’s overprotective and doting Dracula to safeguard his family in various ways - whether by keeping his daughter Mavis (voiced by Selena Gomez) far from the human world or by making sure his grandkids got in touch with their monster ways - began to feel like an animated slapstick version of what might well have been the comedian’s own midlife angst. Over the years, these movies have scored by never promising too much: Mix some obvious (but not necessarily unfunny) jokes, a by-the-numbers story, Adam Sandler doing the world’s worst Dracula accent (which, thanks to the alchemy of Sandler’s commitment to never committing, somehow becomes the world’s best Dracula accent), stitch it all together with some visual inventiveness courtesy of director and cult animator Genndy Tartakovsky, and voilà, you’ve got a hit.īut there was sweetness there as well. That’s been the ethos of the Hotel Transylvania films ever since the very first one in 2012. Hotel Transylvania: Transformania Photo: Sony Pictures AnimationĪim low and you’ll rarely miss.
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