Hotel Transylvania 3: Summer Vacation

The sole reason to watch Hotel Transylvania 3: Summer Vacation if you are an adult is to admire director and co-writer's Genndy Tartakovsky's unique character designs and animation.  This has been a staple of the franchise, and just watching the characters' movements and how their bodies bend, snap and stretch as they animate brings to mind the artstyle of the classic Looney Tunes shorts.  It's really quite refreshing to see a filmmaker use the CG format to invoke a classic animation style, rather than trying to create photo-realistic environments and characters.  Now if only the script was on the same level as the cartoons it was emulating, we'd have one heck of an entertainment.

Hotel Transylvania 3 is pleasant and inoffensive, and will probably work best for kids up to a certain age.  I'd say if you're 12 or older, you're pushing it.  The movie continues the story of Dracula (voiced once again by Adam Sandler), who is not the blood-sucking ghoul you may remember from other movies, but is depicted here as an overworked family man who runs a hotel for monsters, and is in need of a vacation of his own.  His daughter Mavis (Selena Gomez) recognizes this, and books her father and his fellow monster friends on a cruise across the Bermuda Triangle, with its main destination being the Lost City of Atlantis.  Tartakovsky and his team of artists fill pretty much every square inch of the screen with a wide variety of monsters, ghosts and gremlins, and it can be a lot of fun to watch.  Unfortunately, behind the clever visuals, there's virtually no plot and little to care about.

What little plot we do get is centered around the Captain of the cruise ship, Ericka (Kathryn Hahn), who unknown to our monster heroes is the great-granddaughter of Dracula's age-old nemesis, the vampire hunter Van Helsing (Jim Gaffigan).  She's set this trip up as a trap to get all the monsters together in one place so that she can destroy them.  But then, Dracula develops a romantic interest in her, and after a while, she starts to return his affections, and begins to wonder if monsters are as terrible as her great-grandfather told her.  We also get a few underdeveloped subplots for some of Dracula's monster friends.  Wayne the Wolfman (Steve Buscemi) and his wife (Molly Shannon) experience freedom for the first time after they are allowed to drop off their pack of destructive wolf children at the ship's day care, while Frank the Frankenstein's Monster (Kevin James) literally loses his limbs at the gambling table.  Other returning characters like Murray the Mummy (Keegan-Michael Key) and Griffin the Invisible Man (David Spade) show up now and then, but don't really get to contribute anything.

The Hotel Transylvania franchise has always been somewhat of a second-tier animated series, with the inspired and clever animation being the main draw, but they were at least sort of fun and had some jokes that work.  There are still some good gags here, but they are fewer and far-between, and the whole experience just feels a bit slight and more unnecessary than before.  There are glimmers of inspiration to be found.  I liked the early scene depicting an airplane run by destructive gremlins, which transports Dracula and his friends to their vacation.  There's also a new character who was introduced in a cartoon short that showed before The Emoji Movie last year -a massive puppy the size of a dump truck named Tinkles, who sneaks on board the ship and tries to pass himself off as a monster when it learns there are no pets allowed on the ship.  He gets some laughs now and then, but again, the filmmakers seem unsure of what to do with him, and so they mostly just bring him on screen when the film requires some slapstick.

There's really not a whole lot to complain about here, other than the entire movie simply feels unnecessary, and the screenplay by Tartakovsky and Michael McCullers runs out of inspiration not long after Dracula and his friends have boarded the ship.  The movie tries to hold our attention with its technical and artistic style, and it works for a while, but it doesn't take long until you start to realize there's little to be offered here.  Still, the movie does provide a fun time that parents can share with young children, and maybe that's all you're looking for.  I would never discourage a movie for wanting to provide such a simple and noble goal.  There's just a certain lack of effort that eventually rears its head.

If you have young kids who want to see this, they can go without hesitation.  But if you're an adult animation fan looking for something to watch, you'll have to hold out a little while longer for something else.  Hotel Transylvania 3 can be a lot of fun to look at, but its joys are merely surface level.

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