92 min | PG | January 14, 2022 | Amazon Studios
A magic crystal turns Dracula human and turns Johnny into a monster, and the whole family scrambles for a cure before the change becomes permanent. The fourth Hotel Transylvania bets everything on a body-swap gimmick. Everyone transforms except the formula.
Hotel Transylvania: Transformania closes a franchise the only way it knows how. Van Helsing builds a crystal-powered ray that scrambles the line between monster and human. Johnny wants to become a monster so Dracula will trust him with the hotel. The ray turns Johnny into a giant beast and turns Dracula into an ordinary man. The film is about a series that has run out of stories and reaches for a body-swap gimmick to hide it. Transformation is the whole pitch and the whole limit.
Brian Hull takes over Dracula and builds the performance around imitation. He copies the cadence and the accent rather than reinventing the character, and the seams show in the quieter lines. Andy Samberg plays Johnny as pure golden-retriever enthusiasm, and the monster form lets him bellow and flail. Selena Gomez gives Mavis a worry the script never develops, and Kathryn Hahn plays Ericka with more energy than the material earns. Jim Gaffigan turns Van Helsing into a wheezing inventor whose delivery lands the cast’s only reliable jokes. Steve Buscemi and David Spade return as Wayne and Griffin and get nothing to play.
Derek Drymon and Jennifer Kluska direct from a script by Genndy Tartakovsky, Amos Vernon, and Nunzio Randazzo. Tartakovsky created the look of this series, and his fingerprints are all over the animation. The figures stretch and snap with extreme squash-and-stretch, and the action smears across frames at cartoon speed. That elastic style is the best thing here, and it gives the chase scenes a manic energy the writing lacks. The production design leans on bright South American jungles and glowing crystal effects to keep the eye busy. The visual invention works overtime to cover for a plot that moves in a straight line.
The body-swap premise lets every character change shape. The story never changes with them. Drymon and Kluska keep the pace fast enough that small viewers will not get bored. The jokes recycle the same monster puns the earlier films already used. This is a franchise finale that confuses motion for momentum. It ends the series without risking anything.