written by David Steffen
Hotel Transylvania 2 is a 2015 computer-animated children’s comedy produced by Sony. The Legendary vampire Dracula (Adam Sandler) runs a hotel in Transylvania with help from his daughter Mavis (Selena Gomez) and her human boyfriend Jonathan (Andy Samberg). Mavis and Jonathan get married and have a baby they name Dennis (Asher Blinkoff) who is adorable and lovable and apparently very very human to Dracula’s chagrin, because he thinks that his vampiric blood is very strong and will make any of his descendants very vampiric as well. The common knowledge is that vampire kids have to show their fangs for the first time by the time they turn five or they will never show them at all, so Dracula is determined to show Dennis the vampire life and make the fangs show.
If you liked the first movie, it’s very much more of the same, same ensemble cast in general, plus a new red-curly-haired maybe-vampire baby added to the mix.
The first movie was almost entirely based around Dracula trying to build a framework of lies to keep his daughter from being interested in the outside world. This one is very similar in premise in that it’s based around Dracula pretending he doesn’t care about Dennis being “too human” for him and trying to force him to show vampire nature in ever-escalating ways that, if he were entirely human, would be child endangerment in a major way. While the kid was cute, and it was good to see the relationship between Mavis and Jonathan stay pretty solid with a new member of the family in the mix, I found the central premise frustrating rather than funny. Dracula is SO controlling, and where Mavis doesn’t let him get away with it forthright he just sneaks around behind her back and endangers her child in private instead. And despite claiming that he is okay with Jonathan, his utter fixation on making sure the kid is a vampire shows his underlying prejudices (I’m not saying his prejudices are entirely unbased, since humans did kill his wife, but he should have learned by now that those humans were not representative of the whole human race), and pretty much the entire plot of the movie is based on those underlying prejudices, it’s hard to take that as a comedy premise.
