Saturday, September 26, 2015

Film Friday: Hotel Transylvania 2 (2015)

Let me be honest: this movie was made to make money and it sucks *ss... to put it kindly. I seriously wanted to climb over the bored-looking children halfway through this film and demand my money back. My napping wife said I couldn't. Then, as we hit the highly obnoxious and politicized ending, my attitude changed and I went from wanting my money back to wanting revenge. F*ck you, Adam Sandler... die in a fire. Let's get this over with.

Plot

Please, let me outline the ultra creative and interesting "plot." //rolls eyes

Count Dracula's (Sandler) obnoxious daughter marries the surfer asswipe from the first film. They have a baby named Moneygrab. Moneygrab is human (think gay), not a monster (think rotten religious types who can't stand gays). Obnoxious daughter decides that she wants to raise gay boy in California because clearly living with monsters in Kentuckyvannia is somehow wrong even though Moneygrab seems quite happy in Kentuckyvannia. So she goes to California to see if she likes it and we are treated to her rocking a trick bike at midnight in a skate park with a bunch of unsupervised awesome f*cking three-year old children, dude. Awesome. Oh, and she drinks a lot of slurpees all at once! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha f*ck you, Sandler.
Meanwhile, her father tries to turn gay boy into a monster by having each of the monsters take him into the woods and incompetently show him how scary they can be because... well, because. They end up burning down a summer camp for vampires run by a homosexual bureaucrat vampire. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha f*ck you, Sandler.

Obnoxious daughter sees this on youtube and races home to take gay boy back from the Count. They argue and then have a party where she invites Mel Brooks (Dracula's father) so the film can have a final conflict. Mel's servant HATES gays. Servant decides to kill gay boy, but suddenly gay boy turns into an invincible super monster and violently stops all the religious zealot monsters. Everything works out and the mass of contradictions turning this film into bullsh*t get overlooked! Hurray! Roll "credits."

Why Adam Sandler Needs To Be Sodomized With A Weed Whacker

This film was so bad it was insulting. I'm not kidding. As I watched this film, it became obvious to me that Sandler didn't care, either as a writer or an actor. He didn't care about the story, the characters, the dialog or anything else. Let me list this film's sins:
● First, the jokes were clearly written without the slightest interest in making them funny. They were basically lines you would expect presented in a joke format without any real reason for them to be jokes. Most brought a sense that a joke was being told but no real ability to understand what was supposed to make this "joke" funny. To give you a sense of this, consider the scene when obnoxious daughter says to the dirty Arab who runs the Kwiki Mart (yes, he was drawn to look dirty), "This place is open all night, right?" And then they show the Arab standing in front of a sign that says, "Open All Night." He then responds... wait for it... "Yes." Careful, don't laugh too hard.
● Secondly, the dialog is sh*t. Every single line is exactly what you would predict would be said at that moment. There was nothing clever or interesting. The word choice was about as dumbed-down as you could get. The sentence structure of every line was brutally simple. Most of what was said was said for the moment and did not match the plot or the character saying it... they all spoke in the same voice. I suspect they actually let Sandler (Dracula) ad lib his lines. That's the quality of what he said.

● Third, the characters are assh*les. Obnoxious daughter is obnoxious. She's the kind of character who is strongly opinionated and ignores everyone else around her because she's a self-righteous turd, but we're supposed to see her as the wise heroine. F-that. The surfer dude is a reflex character who exists solely so Dracula and obnoxious girl aren't doing soliloquies throughout the film. He's spineless, pointless, and such a retarded surfer that you feel dumber just for listening to him talk. The monsters exist to be the butt of Dracula's personal attacks. The bad monsters exist only at the end to show us how insanely hateful people who don't like gays are. The humans are all California valley/tech stereotypes that might be clever if you live in California and deal with these people regularly, but come across as simply annoying to the rest of us.

Then there's Dracula who gets about 90% of the lines. The problem with Dracula is that he's so intensely stupid and pathetic. He comes across as a 1990's television dad who needs to be skooled by his smarter daughter. He knows nothing and is constantly cowering and apologizing because he's incompetent and his beliefs are wrong and out of date; by the time of the 50th "how do I use technology" joke, you're ready to drive a stake into Sandler's liver. Oddly, Dracula actually embodies the movie's overbearing message of TOLERANCE FOR GAYS and hipsters, yet, the film wrongly treats him as out of touch and lets everyone else lecture him on how wrong he is to lack tolerance... which makes him the film's straw man character.
● Fourth, there isn't an original moment in the plot or the animation.

● Fifth, the story is a contradictory mess. So the theme is tolerance as told to us by moralizing obnoxious daughter. Yet, she doesn't care about the feelings of gay boy, her husband, or her father. In fact, she has no tolerance for their views. She even gets pissed at the humans in California because they tried to make her comfortable by showing her that many human-monster "mixed couples" already exist. This upsets her for no apparent reason that makes sense. Of course, the behavior she displays is the exact behavior she complains about in her father, who by the way had much more tolerance for both monsters and humans than she does even as the film assures us that he's closed-minded about humans. For the record, the reason she wants to move is to raise her son with his own kind (gay boys) rather than monsters. Yet, we're told the father is the bigot for wanting to raise him in a place where humans and monsters live in apparent harmony just because he hopes gay boy becomes a monster. So who's the bigot? The film tells us repeatedly that it's not her.
Then we're told that you need to be gay to be good... monsters suck, unless they are reformed to be gay-like. Indeed, the crime Dracula commits is wanting gay boy to become a monster. That is evil -- though it's not evil to want him to be gay instead of a monster. But then gay boy turns into a monster to save the day an everyone celebrates him becoming a monster. Huh? So the happy ending is exactly what the character we've been told is evil wanted. How does that make sense? How can it be evil to want him to be a monster, but the happy ending is that he turns into a monster? What's more, the evil grandfather (Mel Brooks) suddenly decides he loves people because his grandson saves the day (something Dracula or Brooks could have done without him), but only after becoming a monster. In other words, Brooks hates that he's a human, but the kid turns into a monster so now Brooks loves humans. Nonsense.

What this film is, is a 1990's hypocritical feminist film with cliche characters, nothing interesting or original, dialog generated by a retard, and an in-your-face political message that will piss you off near the ending as it gets beaten into you how evil you are for being a bigot because you won't tolerate somethingsomething hey gays! It's poorly written, poorly voiced, and utterly lacking in creativity. It was made to make money and it feels like it was slapped together over a weekend by a very cynical group who don't mind sh*tting on their audience.

Thank you, Adam Sandler... assh*le.

Don't see this film.

11 comments:

AndrewPrice said...

The language may be a tad harsh, but it honestly fits how I felt watching this film.

ScottDS said...

Don't mince words, Andrew, what do you really think? :-)

[sigh] We'll always have Happy Gilmore and The Wedding Singer and I was never on the Adam Sandler hate train until the last few years when it became clear that he doesn't give a shit anymore. I can't find it right now but there was an interesting article written recently to this effect: Sandler tried the serious thing and people didn't go to the theater. He even parodied his career in that unfunny movie Funny People. He KNOWS... but he obviously isn't interested in correcting the situation.

And Pixels... I didn't see it, and I still think there's a kernel of an interesting idea there, but I've never seen a movie hated on like that. And it wasn't just the usual Internet snark either.

Sadly, there are still critics that will defend him (like that contrarian idiot Armond White who thought Jack and Jill was a good movie).

AndrewPrice said...

Scott, Yeah, this one really pissed me off. I can accept incompetent, but this was asinine mixed with a confused, nonsense hypocritical message at the end.

Pixels looked like a great idea in the trailer at first, but then the reviews came pouring in and they explained everything that was wrong with the film and it quickly became obvious that it was the same Sandler problem... he just doesn't care.

This film really suffers from that. In scene after scene you feel like, "wow, couldn't you think of anything original? And can't you at least finish the jokes?"

To give another example. When the baby is born, Dracula wants to be with his daughter so he tries to go into the delivery room. For no reason that makes sense except to give us a joke, the zombie doctor tell him that only the father is allowed in the room. So what does Dracula do? Think about the most stupid cliche you can and then you'll have it: he cross-dresses as a nurse so he can sneak in. That is like the lowest hanging sit-com fruit.

It gets worse. Having started the cliche, he then dances around the room shaking his butt because that's what nurses do, right? No one else speaks during this scene because this film can't focus on more than one character at a time. THEN, he says... wait for it... "I'm a nurse, obviously, I'm not Count Dracula." //crickets.

But wait, we're not finished yet. Oh no, this pain will not end because Sandler needs 89 minutes exactly and there's no better way to get there than to stretch every scene to the point of enraging your audience. So now the doctor falls for him and tries to hit on him. Because it's funny when a man falls for the main character who is obviously cross-dressed. What's more, the doctor (a zombie) moves very, very slowly across the set before he does this (wastes around 8 seconds just approaching... but it's funny because he's slow!! ha ha). //crickets

Dracula then growls at the doctor as if he were a lion and the doctor turns around and walks away saying something Droopy Dog-like. //crickets

Then the scene just ends. The daughter doesn't even say a word about him being there or how he's dressed or what happened... the scene it just ends because Sandler ran out of joke.

Or how about the scene in California where the daughter is being shown "mixed-couples" and the woman says, "This is (generic woman name) and her husband is a werewolf." Five seconds pass. Husband says in monotone, "I'm not a werewolf." Ten seconds pass in silence. Woman says, "Oh." Ten more seconds pass. Werewolf couple walk out. Ran out of joke, so scene ends.

This whole movie is entirely composed of moments like those.

ScottDS said...

Andrew -

That might be the most passionate reply you've ever written to me, including our disagreements about Kubrick! (P.S. A Clockwork Orange has been airing on HBO. So there.)

;-)

Yeah, it sounds like "George Lucas prequel syndrome": film the first draft and don't bother to come up with anything else!

I truly believe Sandler can be funny, with the right people, under the right circumstances. He even showed up on SNL's bloated anniversary celebration and played some music. He didn't have to and my opinion of him went up just a tiny bit as a result. (It's now at .1 instead of the usual .05.)

AndrewPrice said...

Scott, This movie insulted me. I would have walked out except that it's hard to walk out with kids.

Sandler can be funny, though I've never been a big fan. But this was not funny. This honestly felt like someone who knew he was making a buck and didn't care at all what the finished product was like. I can truly see him siting around just throwing down the first thing to come to mind on paper as he wrote scene by scene and then half-assing jokes into place and never even going back to see if he could improve them. I'll bet the original draft of the scene play is a mess of typos and nonsense sentences that were fixed by some intern right before they were handed to the voice people.

Koshcat said...

I didn't see this movie. I saw the first and it was ok. Not great. Plot was weak as was dialog. I saw the preview of this movie while seeing Insideout and it looked horrible. Even my kids said, this looks really bad. If they can't even catch you with the preview...

The moral of the story is this is why I rarely take my kids to the movies anymore unless it is getting really good reviews from professionals and from personal friends. I refuse to spend my money on this crap. When it comes out on cable or Netflix we may watch it but I won't feel so dirty and cheated.

Last night My wife and I saw an older movie (1993) called The Vanishing with Jeff Bridges, Kiefer Sutherland, and Sandra Bullock. Not a great movie but not horrible. The ending is weak. Got a little predictable and some of the dialog could be better. Sill is was free and I don't feel dumber after watching it.

AndrewPrice said...

Koshcat, I didn't have much choice here. Our girls and my wife loved the original so they wanted to see this. About 10 minutes in, it was obvious to each of them that this film stunk.

I remember The Vanishing. It started really well and was overall enjoyable. And yeah, it didn't leave you feeling stupid.

tryanmax said...

Ugh, too bad. The consensus around Adam Sandler seems to be that he's totally phoning it in these days. He's got a couple of direct-to-streaming movies out now, which is the new "made for TV" or "direct to video." Also too bad because, while the first movie wasn't anything special, at least it didn't try to be political--aside from an obligatory "that's racist!" gag because, well, monsters.

Frankly, the politics surprise me. The review kept bringing Anger Management to mind. Probably because Sandler plays a strawman in that film, too, and the happy ending is the opposite of what the film was supposedly working toward. Of course, that film pulls a fast on at the ending, so bad Sandler scripts aren't exactly new. I'm not trying to say HT2 is something it is not, but it seems like there's a nugget of a bigger idea floating around in Sandler's head.

AndrewPrice said...

tryanmax, That is exactly the problem with Sandler. He gets good nuggets of ideas, but then rather than working them into something pretty, he just kind throws some cliche stuff around them and send them to be filmed. Even a couple hours with this script could have improved it 100%. Not that it would have been great, but it would have been tolerable then. It literally feels like something he wrote in one sitting to be done with it and then he sent it off without giving it any more thought.

djskit said...

Wait is the boy really gay or is "human" in a "monster" world just a cheap analog? Seriously, this is like lawyer jokes, at this point in Hollywood culture, I can't tell when you are kidding or it's for real.

AndrewPrice said...

djskit, No. The kid is just human. They never use the word "gay" and the only obviously gay character is the vampire who runs the summer camp.

BUT... they use all the code words and descriptions Hollywood always uses whenever they delve into the gay issue to describe the child. Basically, you're told how he's different and not like the other kids (more sensitive, etc.) and that's just who he is because he's born that way, and how we evil old white males need to learn to accept him for who he is, etc. etc.

Then the last five minutes reek of nearly pure propaganda as the bad guys appear, go insane in a nonsensical way, shout out lines that sound like something you'd find at a KKK rally, and then get the crap beaten out of them as everyone else feels smug about being morally superior for accepting the child as human... even though he's not human anymore.

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