Hotel Transylvania 3: Summer Vacation (Review)

I Know What You’re Thinking and Don’t Worry if You Didn’t See Hotel Transylvania 2 You Won’t be Completely Lost in Hotel Transylvania 3.

Unfortunately, Hotel Transylvania 3: Summer Vacation follows hot on the heels of Incredibles 2, and that’s a hard act to follow. So, I’ll try to be as gentle as I can with Adam Sandler’s newest animated feature. However, it does suffer from a problem that I see with a lot of kids movies these days, which is that it seems to think it’s audience is stupid. From my experience though, kids might be a bit on the simple side, but they aren’t inherently stupid. The same can probably be said for the parents accompanying them. Then again, Hotel Transylvania 3 might just have the kind of bright, flashy lights and fart jokes that could appeal to the audience it’s aiming for.

Let’s face it, this was never going to be one of the great vampire movies of all time. It’s probably not even going to be one of the great animated movies of the year. That being said, it’s a tolerable children’s movie. It was made for people with short attention spans and feels like an extended episode of a cartoon you might catch on Saturday morning. In other words, it has a very loose act structure and rushes to wrap everything up before the audience gets too distracted by anything shiny. In that regards, it manages to do its job admirably. However, it doesn’t feel like it deserves to be a feature-length tale. Instead, Hotel Transylvania 3 feels like it’s constantly padding it’s runtime with random monster jokes every chance it gets. While a lot of them do land and get plenty of chuckles from the kids, it’s easy to catch on to the game that writer/director Genndy Tartakovsky is playing.

Adam Sandler returns to voice Count Dracula, who is now a grandfather looking to meet a lady monster now that he’s been a widower for a decade or two. Of course, hilarity ensues as he and his friends embark on a cruise hosted by non-other than his arch-nemesis great-granddaughter in disguise (Kathryn Hahn). Essentially, it’s an excuse to put monsters on a boat in order to come up with plenty of cruise related jokes and puns (most notably a fish concierge for the cruise voiced by Chris Parnell). The good news is that fans of this franchise will get exactly what they want from Hotel Transylvania 3.

There’s no point in really dissecting Hotel Transylvania 3. It’s a movie that is made purely for entertainment and profit. It’s just another cog in the machine. Because of that, there’s never really an attempt to make it a truly great movie. It’s not aiming for an Oscar nomination or anything even remotely like that. Instead, it’s meant to sell t-shirts and promote an animated series or two to the little ones that will flock in droves to see it. So, I’m not going to sit here and tell you all the ways it fails as a film when it comes to its narrative, character development or thematic elements. Afterall, if you’re interested in something like that, you probably aren’t considering this film to begin with. So, let’s focus on what probably really matters to you when it comes to Hotel Transylvania 3.

It’s a movie that’s going to be tolerable for grownups. I’ll admit that I chuckled at a few of the jokes (most notably the Gremlin Airlines the monsters all fly on). It’s not side-splitting and there are plenty of gags that will make you roll your eyes, but it’s not going to make you truly suffer for the sake of your child. Unlike a lot of other animated movies, this one doesn’t make an attempt to offer subtle jokes for the parents that have been forced into seeing it, but hey that’s what comes with having a kid sometimes. That being said, I can commend this movie for dealing with an issue a lot of young children might be facing, and that’s when their single parents start dating again. It might not have dealt with it in the most delicate manner, but the message that it’s ok for people to love more than one person in their life is a nice thought and something that should offer some real-life comfort for more than a few kids in the audience.

I can give you a lot of reasons not to race off to see Hotel Transylvania 3. However, you’re probably not seeing it for you. So, let me say instead that you could be subjected to far worse. Given the option, I would always suggest seeing Incredibles 2 in theater, but as a parent, that choice probably isn’t really up to you in the end. Your kids will appreciate the jokes and you’ll get an hour and a half of (relative) peace while they’re engrossed with the hon screen antics. For those of you who don’t have the excuse of a little one wanting to drag you to it, well, you’re going to get exactly what you might expect from this film. Whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing, well that’s all in the eye of the beholder. For me though, being just another cog isn’t something that should be rewarded. Then again, I love Marvel movies, so I can’t really say much.