Hotel Transylvania: Transformania (2022)

The fourth Hotel Transylvania installment arrives by way of streaming, having quietly abandoned its theatrical plans, and it concerns a ray that swaps humans and monsters. The premise is a body-swap comedy, and the body-swap comedy has always been the most forgiving of genres, since it permits a studio to say something about empathy without committing to saying anything at all. Dracula becomes a man. Johnny becomes a dragon. The hotel, as ever, endures.

The film gestures toward acceptance, and the critics who flagged its clumsy messaging were correct to flag it, though the sermon arrives gently, wrapped in slapstick and a campfire heart-to-heart. Dracula learns to see the best in things. Johnny learns that he is family. The voice cast is a competent ensemble with a few recognizable names, presented without commentary, which is the ordinary state of affairs in animation and not a statement of any kind. Mavis and Ericka are capable women who are simply capable. The film advances no argument on their behalf. The tolerance theme runs monsters against humans, a fantasy metaphor that never brushes against anything real, and the body-swap premise toys with being comfortable in your own skin only as a setup for a gag involving a dragon.

What the film declines to do is substantial. There is no climate anxiety, no class critique (the hotel is a family business, lovingly handed down, which makes it the opposite of a target), no neurodivergent characters, no history to revise. This is middling family viewing: relatively painless, largely uninspired. The moral center is soft, the jokes are toothless, and the whole enterprise coasts on the goodwill of a franchise that has been coasting for some time. The animation retains a certain Looney Tunes pep. That is the strongest card in the deck, and it is played early. The sommelier notes a thin body, a familiar nose, and a finish that evaporates before the credits finish rolling. Acceptable for the table. Memorable for no one. The fifth course is already scheduled, which tells us everything about appetite and nothing about quality. We will be back. We always are. The crystal was found, the spell was reversed, the hotel was rebuilt and modernized, and the moral was delivered with a shrug that somehow lasted ninety minutes. Classification complete. The archives accept it. The palate does not stir. Such is the burden of the fourth installment, a film that exists because the first three did, and asks nothing more of us than our continued subscription. We gave it. We moved on. The end credits song played. Nobody sang along. It is fine. It is all fine. That is the whole report. We close the notebook and reach for the next screening, weary but dutiful, custodians of a taxonomy no one requested and everyone deserves. The ray went haywire. The crystal was recovered. The auditorium emptied. Somebody has to log this. It was me. It was always going to be me. Good night, Transylvania. You tried, in your way, which was not very hard and not very far. We grade on the curve of the franchise, and the curve, at this point, is flat. There is nothing left to say about the monsters. They are human now. They were human all along. The metaphor writes itself and the film does not. We file it accordingly. Score withheld from the text, as instructed. The numbers live elsewhere. The pen goes down. The review ends. The review always ends. This one has ended. Truly. Now. Yes. Here.