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Hotel for Dogs
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MPAA RATING: PG for brief mild thematic elements, language and some crude humor
Starring Emma Roberts, Jake T. Austin, Kyla Pratt, Lisa Kudrow, Kevin Dillon, and Don Cheadle
Hotel for Dogs is a smart comedy adventure that shows how far love and imagination can take you. When their new guardians forbid 16-year-old Andi and her younger brother, Bruce, from having a pet, Andi has to use her quick wit to help find a new home for their dog, Friday. The resourceful kids stumble upon an abandoned hotel and using Bruce's talents as a mechanical genius, transform it into a magical dog-paradise for Friday - and eventually for all Friday's friends. When barking dogs make the neighbors suspicious, Andi and Bruce use every invention they have to avoid anyone discovering "who let the dogs in." (Paramount Pictures)
| GENRE(S): | Comedy |
| WRITTEN BY: |
Jeff Lowell
Bob Schooley Mark McCorkle |
| DIRECTED BY: | Thor Freudenthal |
| RELEASE DATE: | Theatrical: January 16, 2009 |
| RUNNING TIME: | minutes, Color |
| ORIGIN: | USA |
All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...
The average user rating for this movie is 3.6 (out of 10) based on 20 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.
Dan F gave it a9:
Inventive and comical with a huge cast of dogs as well as nice performance from Emma Roberts, Don Cheadle and Jake T. Austin.
DadBi gave it a10:
I thought the movie has a good message and kids are bound to like it.
Mary M. gave it a1:
The movie is a romp with cute dogs, but it sends a very clear set of metamessages to impressionable kids that 1) shoplifting is OK if you are helping dogs, 2) lying is OK if you need to lie to be accepted by the cool kids, 3) the police are uptight, mean and hate kids and dogs, 4) people who control stray animals are cruel and incompetent, 5) the foster care system is dickensian and populated by greedy kid-haters (except the Don Cheadle character), and 6) the only good animal shelters are "no kill" shelters. YIKE. Don't let your kids see this movie!
Cameron H. gave it a2:
I took my cousin to this (4YO) and he loved it but i thought it was terrible basically i knew the whole movies plot in about 10 seconds. but good for the kids so take it as you will.
R. C. S. gave it a5:
Good young family movie.
Chad S. gave it a7:
There's truth in advertising: "Hotel for Dogs" is indeed, a movie about a hotel for dogs. But despite the "Snakes on a Plane"-like title, this prosaic moniker delivers more than it promises; the film could easily be called "Utopia for Orphans", or "Hold Me Now: An Appreciation of the Thompson Twins". Carl(Kevin Dillon) and Lois Scudder(Lisa Kudrow) are foster parents who play music for a living; they're an aging male/female rock duo in the tradition of Animotion, Timbuk 3, and Roxette. Needless to say, they're from the eighties(the early-to-mid-eighties are the new late-sixties). What makes this husband and wife team specific to the Thompson Twins, is how the personal lives of(drumroll, please) Alannah Currie, Tom Bailey, and Chris Leeway informs the hotel personnel's. While Heather(Kyla Pratt) puts on a brave face, Andie(Emma Roberts) and Dave(Johnny Simmons) hook up, which was Leeway's fate(who is black like Heather) when Currie and Bailey became an item. Is it mere coincidence that the band was named after characters in the Herge comic strip, "The Adventures of Tintin"? Snowy(the protagonist's dog) was a fox terrier; in "Hotel for Dogs", Friday, a Jack Russell terrier, is white, the color of snow. The eighties tropes don't end there. Heather's willingness(the film hides her masochism, her angst) to help Dave at the dog hotel, strongly recalls Watts, the Mary Stuart Masterson character in Howard Deutsch's "Some Kind of Wonderful". When Heather steps in dog poop, the action itself works as a metaphorical encapsulation of Watts' doggone loyalty for Keith(Eric Stoltz). "Hotel for Dogs", by no means, is White Stripes-good, but the Thompson Twins weren't strictly for the dogs, just like this disposable film. So it's one "woof" for recasting PETA's rhetoric in a filmic language that might galvanize, rather than offend the non-converted, with it's pro-animal message, and one "woof" for being geuninely fun to watch. "Hotel for Dogs" is "King for a Day", or ninety-and-some-odd minutes.
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