Hotel Transylvania 3: Summer Vacation Review

Welcome back to the Hotel Transylvania! Because nothing says middle of July more than your six-year-old's favorite team of monsters. The first two movies opened in the end of September, which made perfect sense since they had all of October to play in theaters during Halloween season. But this third movie sees the gang going on a summer vacation, so Sony decided to release the movie in the middle of the summer. I suppose that makes sense. But I'm wondering now if they are regretting their decision just slightly given the strong performance of "Incredibles 2" that should hurt their business at least slightly since the animated behemoth is set to make another $15-20 million this weekend in its fifth weekend in theaters. Meanwhile the only family films to open in September and October are "The House with a Clock in Its Walls," "Smallfoot" and "Goosebumps 2." Sony could've bullied out "Smallfoot" to a different time and "Goosebumps 2" is their movie, so it seems like a September release may have worked out better, but it is what it is. Current weekend projections have the movie opening in the mid $40 million range, which is exactly where the first two movies opened, so I suppose this little experiment from Sony may work.

I've never actually reviewed a "Hotel Transylvania" movie on this blog. I thought I reviewed the first movie back in the day, but apparently my blog archives claim I didn't. And I know I didn't review the second one. I'll get to the reasoning there in a second. But I did see both in theaters, so allow me to quickly summarize. I'm not a fan. The first one was a fun idea, but I remember walking out feeling a bit empty. Pixar and Disney have been very good at making their animated movies appeal to both kids and adults, but I felt Sony only managed to hit the kids side of that with "Hotel Transylvania." Said demographic was very pleased and the film was harmless enough, so I wasn't bothered by its existence or success, but it just didn't grab me. The second one was a completely different story. The movie set up a beautiful metaphor for how to treat your child if he or she is different than you. Dracula was so excited to have a grandson, but since his daughter married a human, no one knew if said grandson was human or vampire. It appeared that he was pure human, but Dracula couldn't accept this, so he spent the whole movie trying to bring the monster out of his grandson because sometimes vampires are late-bloomers. On the surface Dracula pretended to be open and accepting, but wasn't until the very end of the movie where he finally decided to love and accept him regardless.

This I thought was a beautiful metaphor for all ages hidden in the sequel to a kid's movie. I especially thought it worked well for straight couples who learn their son or daughter is gay or lesbian. How do you react? Most people's first reactions might be similar to Dracula's reaction, but the movie taught us that the proper reaction was to love and accept your child like Dracula finally did for his grandson at the end of the movie. HOWEVER... the twist ending is that the grandson in the movie is a vampire after all, which I felt completely betrayed the whole film and what it taught and instead turned it into an utter rip-off of "The Incredibles" because the young kid's powers weren't revealed until the very end when the villain was about to win, in almost beat-for-beat fashion as Jack-Jack and Syndrome. I was floored by this in a very negative fashion. I struggled as to how I would approach this in my review and that inner struggle resulted in me never getting around to my review because it didn't seem like it mattered anyways because all of that went straight over the heads of the target audience of young kids. In fact, last year I remember my six-year-old niece being very excited when she saw "Hotel Transylvania 2" on Netflix, which caused me to resign in defeat. Kids loved it, so that was OK.

But again, that doesn't mean I personally have to love it, which is the conflict we again run into with "Summer Vacation." I almost don't want to talk about the plot of the movie because the second I start to describe the basic premise here, you'll know exactly what happens. But yet they added the subtitle of "Summer Vacation" instead of simply titling the movie "Hotel Transylvania 3" and that subtitle gives you the plot of the film, so there's no avoiding this. If you don't pick up the plot by looking at the title, you'll know the whole movie from the trailers. Yes, it could be a situation where we get mad at the trailers for spoiling the film, but the plot of this movie is so incredibly simple, thin and predictable that there's nothing Sony could do differently. You get 10 minutes into this movie and you have the whole movie figured out. Our opening montage sets of this nemesis of Dracula named Abraham Van Helsing who will stop and nothing to kill all monsters, but fails at every attempt. Fast forward to the present and we have Dracula in the Hotel being extremely busy and lonely. He wants to find love, but he thinks that there is no hope for him because monsters only zing once. Then his daughter takes him on a cruise ship where he meets the beautiful human ship captain.

That's our premise. You know how the romance angle is going to turn out the second you learn Dracula is lonely and wants to find a date. The second everyone steps foot on this cruise ship and the ship captain introduces herself, you can pretty easily connect the dots as to who she really is. And if you don't end up connecting those dots, the movie gives the big reveal to who she really is and what the master plan is for this cruise ship. And at that point I don't think we've even made it through 20 minutes of the run time. Thus I don't think me telling you straight up who the captain is and what her intentions are would be even spoiling the movie since it happens so early on. But for the sake of humoring everyone, I'll be silent and let you connect the dots on your own. I don't think you need to have seen "Despicable Me 2" to know how it'll play out with the double-crossing romance, even though it kinda follows that plot line beat for beat as well. Take out Gru and Lucy, insert Dracula Ericka, put the movie on a monster cruise ship, and boom! "Hotel Transylvania 3." Are you mad at me at this point? Have I said too much? Well I'm sorry, but maybe if Sony Animation had any ounce of creativity in their bones, I could write a review without spoiling the film by describing the premise.

Here's the other thing about the plot, though. It barely exists. The movie relies on gag after gag after gag. Most of said gags have absolutely nothing to do with the plot of Dracula and his romance with the ship captain. They're just there to make you laugh. And I suppose that's what the point of comedy is. To make you laugh. But the best comedies have the humor cleverly inserted into the plot of the movie, causing there to be an actual flow. "Hotel Transylvania 3" will spend five minutes progressing the plot forward, then 30 minutes with various tangents of jokes following all the different monsters on the cruise ship and what they're up to, a few more minutes on the plot, then another huge section with jokes, and so on and so forth. And it's the type of juvenile humor of the first movie that just did not connect with me. It was almost impressive to me how consistently every single joke missed the mark. I spent most of the movie trying to come up with some sort of philosophical reasoning as to why humor exists and what elements of a joke cause us to laugh so that I could give a deep analysis of why every joke in the movie completely missed for me. I failed to come up with anything, so instead I have to tell you that the jokes didn't make me laugh.

Thus in the end we have a movie that is nothing more than 97-minutes of jokes strung together while occasionally deviating to forward the paper thin plot that you can see coming before you've even hit the 20-minute mark or before you even walk in if you watched any of the trailers. This movie ended up being painful for me to watch because I started becoming uncomfortable in my chair. It was one of those moments where I felt like I had restless leg syndrome, but was confined into a chair and couldn't walk around, thus I was crying inside, begging the movie to end. When it finally did, I was shocked to see this was only 97 minutes long because it felt a lot longer. However, there is ONE sequence in the movie that surprisingly had me busting up laughing and this is actually kind of a spoiler because it's in the final, so that's your warning. But the final battle between the heroes and our villain was a DJ battle between Jim Gaffigan's Van Helsing and Andy Samberg's Johnny. I busted up laughing, nearly uncontrollably when Johnny played "Good Vibrations," followed by "Don't Worry Be Happy" and "Macarena." I don't know why that sequence made me laugh while literally nothing else did, but for that sequence and that sequence alone, I'm elevating this movie up to a 6/10.