Review of Hotel Transylvania 2 (2015) by Justin W — 13 Oct 2015

Hotel Transylvania is a kids movie, plain and simple. Because it was going to happen anyway, we saw it at the Marcus Theater in Waite Park last night. The theater has been more hit than miss lately, although the very first show we saw there, the projector was broken. It wasn't for HT2, which is what the film will be referred to as from here on out. HT2 has an ensemble cast, that includes the likes of Adam Sandler, Andy Samberg, Selena Gomez, Fran Drescher, David Spade, and a number of others including Steve Buscemi. All of them I believe returned to voice this from the first one, which I've not seen yet.

The story is pretty simple. The two main characters have a kid, who it is questionable whether is a vampire or a regular human boy. We spend the whole movie basically waiting to answer that question.

The animation is pretty good, and there were some parts, characters aside, that looked close to real. I am not familiar with Sony Animation but I know the film was directed by the same guy who brought us Dexter's Laboratory.

As I said above, it's a kids movie. Don't expect miracles or anything new from this film, other than blatant Sony product placement. If you see it in the theater, make sure you don't have an idiot kid sitting in front of you who takes out your knee halfway through the film because he had to rock back in the seat fast. I kicked his seat back and he tattled to his dad. Wuss.

Anyway, HT2 is okay. I wouldn't necessarily see it again, unless I had kids, which I don't. That made it that much more odd that we were seeing this film to begin with. The casting is okay, Sandler isn't as funny as he used to be, but the rest of the cast picks up the slack. The visuals as I mentioned were good. The story was meh, but I didn't hate the film.

I do prefer adult movies though, so the next one might be Bridge of Spies, which comes out Friday. On a positive note, our theater has $5 Tuesdays, so it's a lot cheaper to see movies on that night.