Review of Hotel for Dogs (2009) by Gareth R — 06 Jul 2010

As a dog lover, I was expecting to enjoy Hotel For Dogs. Okay, I wasn't expecting to love it. I'm obviously the wrong audience, being no longer the age where all it takes to win my approval is a dog looking quizzical, or covering its eyes when its owner does something stupid, or taking a bath - always to "Splish Splash" by Bobby Darin. But hey, I don't have a heart of stone, and if it's appealing, it should appeal to me. In this case, it doesn't. And not for the reasons I expected.

It's not all poop jokes and "Splish Splash", for instance, and thank God, the dogs don't talk. There's a reasonably strong emotional story - two orphaned kids try to make a home for all the stray dogs they can find, seeing an obvious kinship - and it's got a good message. But, well, the message is flawed, and the whole thing doesn't make any sense. Again, not an issue for those who get by giggling at the sight of cute doggies, but for parents and everyone else, definitely so.

Take the hotel. Miserable kids Andi and Bruce (Emma Roberts and Jake T. Austin) are on the run from the cops - they're in and out of trouble, but just this once they didn't do it - and they find an abandoned hotel with dogs living in it. Deeming it safe for their dog, Friday, to stay overnight, they return the next morning to find one of the dogs howling. He disturbs the neighbours and they almost call Animal Control. What, that's never happened before? How have these dogs survived this long? Anyway, Bruce is a whizz at inventing, so he comes up with ways to feed, clean and poop-scoop as many dogs as they can find. But how can they afford the materials? One generous lad offers to pay for the pet food, but surely not once they've got more than a dozen dogs? He's not loaded - he works for a pet shop, not a law firm. Soon the hotel has a gym, a cinema and a specially-fitted bathroom. All that's ludicrous enough, but how are they even getting the electricity or the water without letting anyone know they're there?

The plot is just plain troubled. So is the depiction of Animal Control, as a couple of seedy guys who really, really want to kill those damn dogs - as if these guys don't have a bad enough rep with children as it is - and the two kids' foster parents, a couple of hopeless rock wannabes who treat Andi and Bruce so badly, you wonder why the hell they bother fostering. Anyway, at one point, our two heroes are offered a great home three hours' drive away. They turn it down because they want to look after the hotel. But by this point, they've got three other people helping, purely by choice. For God's sake, why not let them deal with it? I know they want to stay together and everything, but shouldn't they at least think about it first?

In the end, all is well, of course. The hotel doesn't get shut down, none of the stray dogs go crazy and bite anyone or need medical care of any kind (phew!), and the two kids get adopted by someone who probably wouldn't want them, but heck, there was no one else left in the cast list. The journey from their delinquent beginnings to finally (and suddenly) gaining a happy family doesnâ??t contain many laughs, but it does contain a lot of dogs, and that will be enough for the very undemanding. Personally, I spent the whole thing wondering how any of this could work, and rolling my eyes when stuff that happened was the characters' own damn fault. While it's nice that it encourages the audience to care for animals, it will give them some funny ideas about how to look after them.