One-star accommodation
WE’VE had sexy Draculas and old Draculas, so give credit to Adam Sandler for fresh thinking: No, his animated “Hotel Transylvania” character isn’t a funny Dracula, but he may be the first Jewishmother Dracula.
In the re-vamp “Hotel Transylvania 2,” Drac continues to annoyingly overprotect his daughter Mavis (Selena Gomez), who is now married to human Johnny (Andy Samberg). When she’s sick, he brings her “monster ball soup.”
Mavis and Johnny have a son, Dennis, who Dracula hopes will grow up to be a vampire. Then everyone can live happily together in a hotel built for monsters — Frankenstein and the Wolfman hang around looking for laughs, as does a green blob that looks like a dropout from “Monsters University.” If the boy turns out human, though, everyone plans to leave “Vampa” behind and move to California, where the bloodsucking figures to be merely metaphoric.
The only story element worth mentioning is that the kid will reveal his nature at age 5, by which time fangs would appear, so the movie mostly consists of killing time until the fifth birthday party at the end.
The jokes stink like the Mummy’s armpits. Instead of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” Drac sings “Suffer, Suffer, Screaming Pain.” When little kids are around, his idea of treating them to yoga is having them stretched on a rack.
The kids aren’t the only things stretched: Even at 89 minutes, “Hotel Transylvania 2” is so full of filler and random zaniness that it seems to go on as long as Sandler’s career has been in decline. It’s a sort of kindergarten “SNL” sketch extended by having Dracula break dance, or by introducing Johnny’s parents (Megan Mullally, Nick Offerman) to stand around and get blood coughed on them. When Mel Brooks checks in to play Drac’s dad, looking exactly like Grandpa Munster, you realize Sandler and Co. aren’t trying any harder than they were in “Pixels.”
Mavis, noting that Dracula’s carried a grudge against humans since an angry mob killed her mother, tells him, “Maybe you’ve let humans into your hotel . . . but I don’t think you’ve let them into your heart.” It’s tragic that these bloodsucking ghouls are emotionally unavailable.