"Hotel for Dogs" can be seen as a cute little family comedy that ups its cuteness quotient by multiplying its canine count. (Scores of stray dogs, from purebred to pure digital, inhabit a shelter secretly established in an abandoned hotel by a sister and brother who are themselves orphans yearning for rescue and a good home.) Cute is how kids will likely see it, but here's another way -- as a mixed breed of sweet fantasy and rabid commerce, a film that grabs its audience like a chew toy and doesn't know when to let go.
It's a first feature for Thor Freudenthal, a young German-born director with American experience in visual arts as well as commercial production. His gifts are obvious in the charming title sequence, which follows the siblings' Jack Russell terrier down city streets and sees the world from the pooch's point of view. Like all good things, though, title sequences must come to an end. This one gives way to uncertain comedy, belabored drama and a suffocation of special effects that must have been laid on at the behest of anxious producers or studio executives; debut directors don't get to make such expensive -- or bad -- choices on their own.
The heroine and hero, 16-year-old Andi and her 11-year-old brother, Bruce, are played by Emma Roberts and Jake T. Austin. She's uncomfortable on camera, and probably needed an experienced director. He does well within the confines of a script adapted lumpily from a novel by Lois Duncan. Don Cheadle, as a child welfare officer, falls victim to thin writing -- he's hardly visible for most of the film -- and then to overwriting in a bogus climax. Lisa Kudrow and Kevin Dillon play the kids' foster parents, aging rockers who are supposed to be talent-free, which they are, and funny, which they aren't.
The first guest the siblings bring into the old hotel is their own dog, Friday; their foster home has a no-pets rule and they've been hiding him with increasing difficulty. Soon they're running a guerilla animal-rescue operation that frees prisoners of the city pound and plays host to every stray in town. This part is darned near irresistible; how could anyone but . （英语影评）Fields knock a movie that gives generous face time to a giant Bull Mastiff who watches over a Boston terrier with a spoon fetish, to a glamorous French poodle and an anorexic Chinese Crested (or is it breed-appropriately svelte?), not to mention a formerly four-legged friend who does three-legged walk-ons? The plot is about creating an extended family, and the film functions as a family album that's no less enjoyable, at first, than the Weimaraners-as-people portraits of William Wegman.
What's easy to resist, although hard to hide from, is the f/x bombardment, much of which grows out of the character of the kid brother, Bruce. He's been identified early on as a genius gadgeteer, so he builds elaborate machines to automate the services of a dog hotel with an ever-expanding guest register. Yet they aren't machines a kid could create. They're the sort of machines a special-effects house creates when it gets orders to emulate the outlandish mechanics of "Inspector Gadget," or, at one point, imitate the assembly-line feeding technology of Charlie Chaplin's "Modern Times."
The film will surely do well -- new family entertainments are few and far between -- and would seem to be harmless at worst, so why beat up on its obvious flaws? Because it's sad to see a promising fantasy turn into yet another industrial-scale fantasy-delivery system that beats up on its audience with mindless intensity and undercuts its own humanity -- and caninity -- in the process. Fantasy needs quiet moments, time to breathe and reflect. Young audiences can be trusted to savor those moments on their own.
