'Hotel Transylvania' comes up short on laughs

“Hotel Transylvania” has a big-name cast, a cute premise and ... and ... hang on, thinking here.

Nope. That’s about it. There are a few laughs sprinkled throughout director Genndy Tartakovsky’s film, but not nearly enough. It’s practically a “Saturday Night Live” reunion, with Adam Sandler, Andy Samberg, David Spade, Jon Lovitz and Chris Parnell among the actors lending their voices to the movie. But like so many of these extended Sandler professional family reunions, it falls flat.

Cool idea, though. Dracula (Sandler), having suffered tragedy at the hands of humans (well duh), builds a hotel that is a refuge for monsters. They can let their hair down, so to speak, without fear of detection or being seized upon with pitchforks and torches. Humans don’t even know the place exists.

Yet.

Every year Dracula hosts a big shebang for the birthday of his daughter Mavis (Selena Gomez). All his pals come: Frankenstein (Kevin James), Quasimodo (Lovitz), the Fly (Parnell), the Invisible Man (Spade), Wayne the wolfman (Steve Buscemi) and more. And this year is special. It’s Mavis’ 118th birthday, crucial to her because her father has promised that at this age she can leave the castle and see the world a bit. She’s excited.

Dracula is not. Turns out he has an overprotective streak, which becomes even more pronounced once his worst fear is realized: a human bumbles his way into the hotel. Jonathan (Samberg) is what would have been in an ’80s teen comedy a stoner dude; now he’s a sort of ski-bum slacker type, with the baked sensibility still intact. Worse yet, Mavis appears to have a crush on him.

And then … well, that’s about it, really. Dracula spends a lot of time and energy trying to tamp down the obvious attraction between Mavis and Jonathan, while also trying to prevent the other guests from discovering that Jonathan is a human. (The cover story is that he is a relative of Frankenstein, which is a surprise to everyone. Including Frankenstein.)

The funniest bits, which means the bits that parents will appreciate as much as kids (or more), involve Wayne and his gigantic brood of cubs running rampant around the hotel, and his accompanying exhaustion chasing them around. The combination of the look of word-weariness on Wayne’s face and Buscemi’s already-gave-up delivery is the best thing about the movie.

Everyone else is, like the movie, hit and miss. Not bad, not good, just sort of plodding along in as generic a way as possible. No one harmed, no one offended, no one challenged. And no one entertained as much as they should be.

Maybe we’re spoiled. Maybe movies like all of those Pixar classics and “Shrek” and whatever else have made us expect too much. Or maybe not. Maybe the form has evolved, and there is a higher standard for animated fare, no matter how young the audience for which it’s aimed. That’s the likelier scenario, and by that standard, something so generic as “Hotel Transylvania” doesn’t measure up.

A lot of the movie is. Most of it isn’t. A better film would be a documentary about Suvari’s and Bates’ agents, explaining how they got their clients into this.