Dracula takes a cruise in Hotel Transylvania 3, eight years on

Hotel Transylvania 3: Summer Vacation sends Dracula on a cruise, and the film never quite decides whether that is a joke or a rescue mission. Directed by Genndy Tartakovsky, who wrote it with Michael McCullers, the Sony Pictures Animation release runs 97 minutes and lands in the middle of the franchise: bigger than the first two, looser than either, and content to let a strong premise do work the script will not finish.

Trailer, via Sony Pictures Entertainment.

Dracula Boards the Legacy

The setup is the film’s best idea. One year after the second movie, Dracula is running the hotel smoothly alongside Mavis and Johnny, and he is depressed. He has stayed single since his wife’s death, and his attempts to meet someone have gone nowhere. Mavis reads his mood as overwork and books a family cruise, which is how the Drac Pack ends up on a ship called Legacy.

Then Dracula sees the captain, Ericka, and falls in love at first sight — something he thought impossible, since he had already “zinged” once before. Kathryn Hahn voices Ericka. Adam Sandler returns as Dracula, with Selena Gomez as Mavis, Andy Samberg as Johnny, and Asher Blinkoff as Dennis.

Ericka’s Secret Room

The film’s second engine is a betrayal it keeps in plain sight. Ericka slips away to a private room on the lower decks and meets Abraham Van Helsing, secretly her great-grandfather. Jim Gaffigan voices him. Van Helsing has mechanized nearly his entire body to avoid death, and he is still chasing the plan he has chased for more than a century.

That plan has a deadline. When the cruise reaches the lost city of Atlantis, he intends to use an Instrument of Destruction hidden in the ruins to eliminate every monster aboard. He makes Ericka promise not to assassinate Dracula before then. She agrees, then tries anyway, repeatedly, and fails every time.

1897, Budapest, and a Train Roof

The film opens in 1897, with Dracula and his friends traveling in disguise on a train to Budapest, then the capital of the Hungarian part of Austria-Hungary. Van Helsing boards, exposes the monsters, and the chase begins. They escape over the roof. Dracula shoves his friends off the train to save them.

That cold open is the sharpest stretch of the movie. It is drawn with real momentum, it gives Van Helsing an obsession worth watching, and it sets up a century of failed revenge without explaining too much. Everything after it is a vacation comedy that keeps interrupting itself.

What the Drac Pack Does With the Time

The supporting cast is the franchise’s standing asset and its standing problem. Kevin James voices Frankenstein, Fran Drescher is Eunice, Steve Buscemi is Wayne, Molly Shannon is Wanda, David Spade is Griffin, and Keegan-Michael Key is Murray. They are funny in isolation and inert in a group, because the script hands them bits instead of arcs.

One running gag does land. Dracula’s friends overhear Ericka complaining about her failure to get close to him and read it as affection. It is a clean misunderstanding, and it gives the middle of the film a pulse the romance alone cannot.

Mixed-to-Positive, and a $528 Million Haul

Hotel Transylvania 3: Summer Vacation premiered at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival on June 13, 2018, and opened in United States theaters on July 13. It grossed $528 million against a budget of $65–80 million, the highest total in the series. Critics landed mixed-to-positive. Metacritic sits at 54/100.

Here is the release order for the franchise:

A spin-off series, Motel Transylvania, is also in the works. The source material does not give its premiere date, so we will not guess at one.

The origin story behind the film is more interesting than most of the film. Tartakovsky confirmed his return in June 2016 after finding inspiration in a “miserable” family vacation and the Chevy Chase National Lampoon’s Vacation movies. The title was announced in November 2017. That is the right instinct — a family trip as a pressure cooker — and the movie only half uses it.

Where the Vacation Sinks

Ranked by what actually works, the film breaks down like this:

1. The 1897 train sequence, which has stakes, speed and a villain worth fearing.
2. The overheard-complaint gag, the one sustained comic idea in the middle act.
3. The Atlantis climax, which is loud, busy and over almost as soon as it starts.
4. The romance between Dracula and Ericka, which the film treats as a foregone conclusion rather than a problem to solve.

The romance is the load-bearing wall, and it is the thinnest part of the build. Ericka’s divided loyalty should be the engine of the whole picture. Instead the movie keeps her assassination attempts at the level of slapstick, so neither the danger nor the attraction ever deepens. Dracula never has to reckon with loving the great-granddaughter of the man who has hunted him for over a century. He mostly has to survive dinner.

Tartakovsky’s animation remains the reason to show up. The character design is elastic and specific, the monster gags are staged with real timing, and the cruise ship is a good enough set that the film could have stayed aboard and been better for it. The Atlantis detour is where the budget goes and where the movie stops being about anything.

The Verdict on Hotel Transylvania 3

Hotel Transylvania 3: Summer Vacation is a competent family film with one excellent opening, one good running joke, and a central relationship it never bothers to complicate. The tagline promises Dracula will need a vacation after this vacation. The movie does not earn that. It earns a pleasant 97 minutes and a shrug.

The franchise math is not hard to read. A $528 million gross against a $65–80 million budget makes a fourth film inevitable, and Hotel Transylvania: Transformania arrived in 2022. Commercial success here says more about the audience for monster comedies than about the quality of this one. Tartakovsky built something with a real voice in 2012; by the third trip he is running a resort.

What is worth keeping is the 1897 opening and the version of this movie that trusted it. Van Helsing mechanized nearly his whole body to keep hunting. That is a villain with a thesis. The cruise is a setting, and settings do not carry pictures.

Adam Sandler · animation · Genndy Tartakovsky · Hotel Transylvania 3 · movie review · Sony Pictures Animation