Movie Review: Hotel Transylvania Will put You Off Vacations

 Hotel Transylvania 3: Monster  vacation

Animation  Film with voiceovers  by Adam Sandler , Andy Samberg, Selena Gomez, Kathryn Hahn

Directed  by Genndy Tartakovsky

Rating: **

Just when you  feel  happy about animation films  coming of age with The Incredibles 2 , the sheer juvenile delinquency of  this franchise over-reacher  knocks you senseless.

 Hotel Transylvania 3  sees smudges of  psychedelic colours  applied to characters who are so  broad they seem drawm with  the pencil ofpreposterousness. There  is nothing subtle about   Hotel Transylvania   which miraculously has reached Stage  3 without making any effort to broaden the bandwidth of  its splashy  bacchanalia.

No wonder  Count Dracula (voiced ably by Adam Sandler) is stuck in time warp. He is  supposedly over  500 years old.This is  how old I felt  after sitting through this dreadful mishmash of ill-conceived  ghoul , though alas not so cool, gags and cyber stunts that make the animation characters  look like creatures in a pop-out book for nursery schoolers.

 The  humour tried hard to be urbane. And some of  the situations on-board a vacation cruise where  Dracula falls  in  love with the sassy seductive  captain  of  the ship Erica(voiced with a smouldering splendor by  Katheryn Hahn) are smile-inducing , specially the way Dracula goes mooney-eyed and  zonked-out on seeing Erica ,and the way Dracula’s disapproving daughter Mavis(nicely voiced  by Selena Gomez ) watches the  growing romance between her father and  ship-riped stranger.

 But then Erica has a hidden agenda. A-ha! She is not what she seems.The vendetta angle reminded me  of the 1969 Bollywood film Inteqaam.

 The smudgy splashy pandemonium  done in a breathless rush, works only  for those who  treat  the movie-going experience as a  joyride contained in a bag of  popcorn. For those of  us who thought animation films  from Hollywood had  attained a state of maturation after TheIncredibles 2, this film comes as a rumbustious  jolt, reminding us that the “intelligence” applied to virtual entertainment  has more to with the colloquial communication conventions of  the social media than any genuine passion for carrying forward the cinematic  torch.

 Torn between a family saga  of  monsters pleading for legitimacy, and  a rollercoaster  fun escapade for  audiences who think a giggle is  all the reward we need for braving  it  into a multiplex  , this film just exasperates you with its gimmicks and gags . It tried too hard to please.

At the outset when Dracula’s daughter  suggests a vacation to get  over the vacation crowds at the eponymous  Hotel, what  we don’t know is, we would need a vacation from animation to get over this one.