Hotel Transylvania 4: Transformania(PG)
Voices of Andy Samberg, Selena Gomez.
Also voices of Kathryn Hahn, Jim Gaffigan, Steve Buscemi, Molly Shannon, David Spade, Keegan-Michael Key and Fran Drescher. Adam Sandler, who voiced main character Dracula for the first three of these movies, has passed the microphone on to voice doppelganger Brian Hull.
The movie gives you the gist even if you’ve never seen any of these Hotel Transylvania movies before (or, if, like me, you’ve definitely seen some of them but can’t remember much of anything about them): Drac and his vampire daughter Mavis (voice of Gomez), her human husband Johnny (Andy Samberg) and their son Dennis (voice of Asher Blinkoff) run a monster-serving hotel in a creepy Transylvanian castle that does such a brisk business Drac employs many a zombie and ghoul. Newly married to human Ericka Van Helsing (voice of Kathryn Hahn), great-granddaughter of The Van Helsing (voice of Gaffigan), Drac has been planning to officially turn the hotel over to Mavis and Johnny. But Johnny is such a stone cold goofus that Drac backs out at the last minute, telling Johnny that it’s because the property can only be passed to another monster. Johnny, desperate to truly be part of the family, uses Van Helsing’s monster-ray to turn himself into a monster. When Drac attempts to turn Johnny back into a human, he accidentally turns Frankenstein, the mummy and Wayne the werewolf human, creating all sorts of people who need to be returned to their former form — including Drac himself, who finds himself becoming human and losing the power to turn into a bat mid-fall.
Because the McGuffin-ray is broken in the process, Drac and Johnny set off on a quest to find a crystal that will repair it and set things right. What they don’t know when they head off is that, while Drac can eventually adjust to being human with some sunscreen and a shower, Johnny is in danger of having his monsterness constantly mutate until he becomes a giant, mindless, brightly colored destructo-saur.
If you have Amazon Prime, you have access to this movie for free — which is probably its principal selling point. This movie doesn’t feature nearly enough monster hijinks and physical comedy and is way too talky and focused on the plot of Drac handing off his hotel. (I’m sure there’s a joke in here about this being Succession for kids but with literal monsters instead of psychological monsters, but this movie doesn’t really warrant that much cleverness.) I don’t think my younger kids care about father-in-law/son-in-law relationships and they probably would have liked more with the swarm of werewolf puppies and the comedy based on the Blob. But this movie isn’t, like, actively offensive or particularly violent and I think my older kid would watch this if it were the only thing available or if it was the alternative to some kind of chore, so, C? Available via Amazon Prime.
Munich: The Edge of War (PG-13)
George MacKay, Jannis Niewöhner.
Jeremy Irons also stars in this adaptation of a Robert Harris novel which is surprisingly suspenseful despite the fact that it is about two guys running around in 1938 not preventing World War II. I mean, spoiler alert? Not really, and that’s kind of an interesting creative challenge when you set up your characters to complete a mission the larger outcome of which is already known to have failed.
Here, we get our spy thriller tension in part from the fact that British translator Hugh Legat (MacKay) is rather spectacularly not a spy. He seems like sort of an aide to prime minister Neville Chamberlain (Irons), who is sent on a delegation going to peace talks in Munich in part because years earlier he went to college with German Paul von Hartman (Niewöhner). A similar mid-level government type, Paul worms his way into the German delegation by serving as a translator for Hitler (Ulrich Matthes). Paul is part of a small group of German government types who think that, if Hitler illegally invades Czechoslovakia, they’ll be able to get the support of the German military and oust Hitler from power. Instead of invading, Hitler agrees to first meet with the British and French and his ally Italy to discuss a means of avoiding war — or, as it plays out here, a means by which the other countries can let him take chunks of Czechoslovakia without them having to intervene.
But Paul has different plans. He wants to use the conference as a cover for passing documents to Hugh, his old Oxford buddy, that prove that Czechoslovakia is just the beginning and that Hitler is planning a war of conquest throughout Europe. He gets a guy to get a guy to get Hugh included in the British delegation so that they can work together to get the documents to the right people and prevent the countries from appeasing Hitler. But while Paul, a former ardent Hitler-supporter who has become disillusioned with the Nazis, is used to sneaking around, Hugh, just a guy who regularly gets yelled at by both his boss and his neglected wife (Jessica Brown Findlay), is not great at skulduggery. For example, he “hides” important papers in a desk drawer in his hotel (why not staple them to the door, Hugh) and is so bad at following Paul without being seen that they might as well be holding hands and singing.
I wish the movie had played that aspect — Paul as the weary citizen of a police state, Hugh as a neophyte — up a bit more, because it did help ramp up the tension. Weighing in at over two hours, I think the movie could have lost some of the side stories and focused on a streamline tale of two men trying to desperately do some real world-saving behind the scenes of some hot-air diplomacy. We take a lot of detours into Lenya (Liv Lisa Fries), a mutual college friend who had formerly been together with Paul; Hugh’s shaky marriage and stalled career, and Paul’s relationship with his assistant, Helen (Sandra Huller). Shaved down by about half an hour and more singularly focused on the diplomacy-spy angle, Munich: The Edge of War could have been a more energetic noir-ish suspense film. As it is, it is occasionally pokey but watchable history drama fare. C+ Available on Netflix.
Swan Song (R)
Mahershala Ali, Naomie Harris.
Also Glenn Close and Awkwafina.
In the cleanly designed, tech-filled future, Cameron (Ali) is terminally ill but hasn’t yet told his family, including wife Poppy (Harris). This gives him a rare opportunity: He can tell them about his condition and live out his final days with them or he can essentially download his memories and personality into a healthy but otherwise identical clone who will slip into his life. Either way, Cameron won’t be there to see his young son and the baby Poppy is currently pregnant with grow up, but a Cameron can be there for them.
Dr. Jo Scott (Close) is the doctor performing this strange, secret procedure at what feels like a beautiful, modernist spa out in the woods where Cameron also meets Kate (Awkwafina), a woman who is essentially waiting for her end while her replacement has been living her life. His wife is just getting over a prolonged period of grief over the death of her brother and has previously stated that she would be happy to have such a real version of her mother back, especially if she didn’t know it wasn’t her “real” mother. These are Cameron’s arguments for going through with the swap. But he is also bothered by the deceit and the loss of his life before his death by basically giving it away to someone else.
Most of this movie is Ali’s performance and, as you’d expect, he gives a solid one, one that allows for enough suspension of disbelief about the sci-fi aspects so that you can swim around in the bigger picture life questions with his characters. This isn’t some twisty thriller; the movie is more concerned with the internal journey Cameron takes and as that kind of contemplative tale it is engrossing. A Available on Apple TV+.
