‘Hotel Transylvania 2’: Be Yourself as Long as Yourself is What I Want You to Be

The following review contains a major spoiler for Hotel Transylvania 2 in case you actually give a darn about spoilers for Hotel Transylvania 2.

Count Dracula and his pack of monsters are back for another shameless cash grab in Hotel Transylvania 2. Set a few years after the first movie, Mavis and Johnny are married and punched out an adorable little carrot top who is, much to Dracula’s disappointment, fully human. Still, that’s not going to stop Dracula from trying to awaken his grandson’s latent vampire traits even if he has to kill his grandson to do it!

Which he almost does.

Several times.

Dude’s psychotic, yo.

Love it or hate it, you’ve got to love the raw frenetic energy that this movie practically bleeds profusely all over the screen. Rarely do you ever see computer generated cartoons look and feel like those old Loony Tunes shorts, but this one – much like its predecessor – does it and it does it with charm and gusto. Dracula, Wolf-Man, Mummy, and Frankenstein move like cartoon characters… actual cartoon characters and I love that about these movies. Aside from maybe Madagascar, CGI cartoons rarely come this close to this level of balls out cartooniness.

As for the story, it’s all right… nothing that’s going to win a lot of awards and it pretty much boils down to a lesson about accepting the differences in people which is very old hat but at least honorable. In this case, though… the movie blows it. After all, the whole point of the movie is for Dracula to accept that his grandson, Dennis, is a normal human but the movie negates all of that in the final act when the predictable happens and Dennis’ vampire powers awaken.

So… does that mean that the moral of the movie is “Accept someone who’s different because they’ll change to what you want eventually?” I would have really preferred if Dennis had stayed human because at least then, it wouldn’t have been a moral that was callously shrugged off in favor of a comedy/action sequence.

Still, this movie is a lot of fun and one of the last worthwhile things Adam Sandler has done in his career. It was great to hear Mel Brooks again as well because he really doesn’t do enough anymore.

It’s not The Lion King or Finding Nemo, but it’s a harmless and high-energy comedy that brings on the laughs and exudes energy from every CGI pore. The message gets muddled, but at least its cold dead heart was in the right place.