Hotel Transylvania 2

Fangs, Phones, and Fatherhood

There is a strange, tug-of-war energy to *Hotel Transylvania 2*. On one side, you have director Genndy Tartakovsky, a guy who understands kinetic, snappy animation better than almost anyone working today. (If you grew up on *Dexter's Laboratory* or *Samurai Jack*, you know exactly what I mean). On the other side, you have Adam Sandler and his usual suspect crew of comedy pals, treating the recording booth like a weekend hangout. What happens when you smash a visual stylist together with a script built on dad jokes? You get a movie that is somehow beautiful to look at and aggressively silly to listen to. I am not entirely sure the combination always works, but there is an undeniable, goofy charm to it anyway.



Dracula is a grandfather now. That is the engine driving this 2015 sequel. His daughter Mavis (Selena Gomez) and her human golden-retriever of a husband, Jonathan (Andy Samberg), have a kid named Dennis. Dracula is desperate for the boy to grow fangs, convinced that a late-blooming vampire is better than no vampire at all. Naturally, this leads to an elaborate road trip where Drac and his aging monster buddies try to scare the monster out of the kid. Tartakovsky uses this setup to push the animation into glorious, Looney Tunes-style exaggeration. Characters stretch, snap, and distort. Backgrounds have a painterly, atmospheric richness that frankly belongs in a more serious film.



Take the running gag with Dracula's smartphone. He cannot operate the touchscreen because his rigid, two-inch vampire fingernails keep getting in the way. It is a brilliant little piece of physical comedy. We watch him tap, growl, and fumble with the glowing rectangle, his centuries-old dignity crumbling over a simple text message. Writing for Gizmodo, Charlie Jane Anders pointed out that "the inability of the monster characters to make sense of the 21st century sort of mirrors how dumb this movie's story is, when placed against the sophisticated animation". She is not wrong. The plot is basically a clothesline for gags. Sometimes those gags land, and sometimes they thud.



Sandler, who also co-wrote the script this time around, actually gives a surprisingly warm vocal performance. After years of playing man-children in live-action comedies, forcing his slacker persona into the rigid, controlling frame of a classic movie monster pushes him to actually try something different. You can hear the affection in his voice when he talks to his grandson. Sure, the third act awkwardly wedges in a villain to give the climax some artificial stakes. Maybe they realized ninety minutes of monster-camp hijinks wasn't quite enough to fill a feature. Whether that sudden pivot bothers you probably depends on your tolerance for loud, chaotic finales. I found myself wishing we could just go back to watching Dracula struggle with his iPhone.