Metacritic reviews

Hotel Transylvania is very different from its contemporaries. You just wish that, with so much emphasis on chaos, they could have spent a little more time on character.

Hotel Transylvania doesn't raise the bar for animation or comedy but it's fun, and nice for once to have a different reason to say "boo" after an Adam Sandler flick.

Although it doesn't worry itself with dialectic complexities, Hotel Transylvania succeeds on the level of entertainment.

It's the parental mush about trusting one's kid to make her own discoveries and blah blah blah (spoken in a Sandlerized version of a Dracula voice) that drains the movie of blood. What's left are platitudes, and Sandler singing a novelty song in a Transylvanian-accented falsetto.

Hotel Transylvania is occasionally the kind of fast-moving, gag-a-second film that relies on quantity of humor rather than quality.

Yet another instance of a decent, potentially thorny premise bogged down in a mess of treacly sentiment and tedious moralizing.

No surprises or major laughs here, but as far as Sandler family fare goes, it's inoffensive enough.

Hotel Transylvania checks in as an anemic example of pure concept over precious little content.

A stale overprotective-dad story set within a location that could easily house a more inspired mix of characters and events.

So why does this animated kids' film fail to come together? Bursts of manic pacing steamroll over most of the wit, a little of Sandler's thick-accent shtick goes a looong way, and by the time the requisite life lessons about letting your offspring leave the nest get rolled out, the undead-on-arrival jokes are outnumbered by anemic sitcom gags.