Hotel for Dogs: Review By B. Alan Orange

Marley & Me was just the latest in a long line of dog-centric movies hitting the multiplex. Quite a few have come, and there are many more in our near future. Each and every one seems to find its audience. Marley racked up huge profits over the holidays, and back in October, Beverley Hills Chihuahua did the same. Now comes Hotel For Dogs, which steals a little from both camps. It has a lot of different mutts, a few of which you'll find hard pressed not to fall in love with. But they don’t talk. Nor do they get euthanized in a communal gas chamber. So its win-win all the way around. The dogs are cute. The kids are palpable. And the story is very pedestrian and non-threatening. Perfect for the Nickelodeon crowd; from wince this mellow comedy of errors sprang.

Forget about the obvious questions. I know, twenty minutes into this homogenized adventure, that you will be asking yourself, “Why is there a beautiful, abandoned hotel in the heart of New York City still flush with valuable items and working plumbing?” And then you will ask yourself, “How does this nine year old kid know how to make such intricate and amazing contraptions?” And then you will ask yourself, “Why doesn’t the pet store ever grow susp*cious of its absent employees and missing dog food?” The final inquiry will surely be, “How come Kevin Dillon and Lisa Kudrow don’t get more screen time?” The simple answer to each one is: “This is a kid’s movie for the under five set. They won’t care about that stuff. And the Dillon/Kudrow relationship is a little too heady for their tastes.”

If you are an adult wandering into this, you either have children of your own, are a nanny, or love dogs. All but the last of these audience members will find themselves growing bored with this faux-Disney pabulum. There isn’t much of a story here. Or a reason for being. It’s mostly about the dogs looking cute. And doing cute things. Not funny things, mind you. There isn’t one laugh out loud joke to be found in the whole film. And that’s alright. It’s a quiet entertainment for super young toddlers. Its bright colors and excellent Sesame Street message of family values will provide a couple of hours of divergence. When it hits the home market, it will become a good babysitter. The dogs are all quite photogenic. And they play nice with the concept.

The main push of the story revolves around two orphaned siblings, as fairytales so often do. They are a brother and sister team that likes to con pawnshops into buying laminated rocks posing as cell phones. Actually, the two kids are little jerks. They steal food from their Foster parents, and are constantly getting in trouble with the law. If they were ugly, they’d be the type of naughty kids Santa would spank with long rulers made of coal. But no, they are as cute and precocious as the dogs that surround them. Played by Emma Roberts and Jake T. Austin, you can’t help but like them. And we, as audience members, actually let them get away with quite a bit.

They own a ghetto mongrel named Friday that steals food and prances about the back alleys of New York. It’s not allowed to come into their Foster home, ruled by wanna-be rockers Lois and Carl Scudder. These two vagabonds, as played by Lisa Kudrow and Kevin Dillon, provide the only real spark of life the film ever achieves. As the plot unfolds, Andi and Bruce’s supposedly wicked “step-parents” don’t really seem all that evil. They’re just particular. And at first, you might think it cruel that Lois locks up her cabinets and refrigerator. But these folks aren’t rolling in dough. And Andi and Bruce, the little sneak thieves that they are, are stealing all of their food to feed every last stray dog in town. That’s a lot of hungry mutts. And that might start to weigh heavy on a pocket book.

For a while, Hotel for Dogs plays like a metaphor to the plight of Romania’s abandoned dog population. When Friday is faced with immediate execution at the local pound, Bruce and Andi must do something desperate. They don’t want to see their little buddy euthanized like Marley. In a frantic search to find the pooch a new home, they stumble across an abandoned hotel right smack dab in the middle of town. And its hardly been touched since the last bellhop left for ports unknown. There are two other dogs already living there. So, Andi and Bruce dump Friday off and then begin their huge renovation program. With the help of two local pet store employees, who offer up the store’s food supply, they turn this dump into a safe haven for abandoned hounds. Basically, Hotel for Dogs is the canine version of 1986’s Playing for Keeps.

There is a forty-five minute montage sequence that shows the kids and dogs having way too much fun. And then the third act drama hits. Andi and Bruce are going to be shipped off to a new Foster home. Oh, no! Say it isn’t so. What will ever happen to the dogs? If you don’t know the answer, then maybe this film is for you. And it’s true; you obviously haven’t seen too many films. All in all, Hotel for Dogs is quite harmless fodder. It’s definitely adorable, like a velvet painting of bullmastiffs playing poker. But it leaves little to offer those of us that actually want a little bit of sustenance with our night out at the movies. For young kids and dog lovers, the film gets a whoop-doo! For us more sophisticated film fanatics, it gets a lean, meat-free Boo! (Seriously, how mad can you get at a movie with a bunch of dogs in it? Not very.)

(All of B. Alan Orange’s reviews are based on the Boo! or Whoop-doo! evaluation system.)