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Hotel for Dogs
DreamWorks Pictures (Paramount)


3.1

based on 23 reviews
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How did we calculate this?

based on 16 votes
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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...

San Francisco Chronicle Walter Addiego

It's no great shakes as a film, but its combination of mild comedy, slapstick, pathos, many photogenic canines and a positive message will make it irresistible to families.

Miami Herald Connie Ogle

A lively, funny, imaginative film that should appeal to kids and their pet-loving parents.

New York Post Kyle Smith

Kids will be as enthralled by this film as you were by the live-action Disney movies of the '70s. It doesn't get any sweeter than a roomful of mattresses with kids and dogs jumping on them.

Chicago Reader Andrea Gronvall

A bright, funny family movie that gets everything right, from story to production design to cast (both human and canine).

Los Angeles Times Betsy Sharkey

What it is packed with is lots of sneaking around, very cool gadgets, excellent stunts and some clever kids.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer Paula Nechak

The movie's political and moral points -- and theme about creating family however you can find it -- elevate it above the average kids movie.

Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert

A sweet, innocent family movie about stray dogs that seem as well-trained as Olympic champions. Friday, the Jack Russell terrier who's the leader of the pack, does more acting than most of the humans, and doesn't even get billing.

Chicago Tribune Michael Phillips

Not bad, not great, a little less pushy and grating than the usual.

Variety John Anderson

Ultimately warm and furry, with a wet nose buried in gross receipts.

Washington Post John Anderson

On the upside, the movie could do something really positive for the cause of homeless pets: If audiences respond the way they should, dog shelters could be emptied in a week.

New York Daily News Joe Neumaier

Even the youngest viewers, not to mention their parents, will appreciate the buffoonish villainy of the dogcatchers (still useful villains more than half a century after "Lady and the Tramp"), and the movie's nice anti-kill shelter message is as it should be.

The Onion (A.V. Club) Keith Phipps

What does a film called Hotel For Dogs need in order to avoid being a watch-checker for grown-ups? Whatever it is, Hotel For Dogs doesn't have it.

The Hollywood Reporter Kirk Honeycutt

It's a pretty lazy film in the creativity department save for the dogs.

Philadelphia Inquirer Carrie Rickey

At its best, the movie is a catalog of doggy stunts.

USA Today Claudia Puig

Between the dogged efforts of the kids to save strays and the antics of the dogs, it's hard to resist this lively, though predictable, family movie.

Boston Globe Ty Burr

Hotel for Dogs is agreeable Saturday afternoon multiplex piffle - friendly, formulaic, completely harmless.

Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern

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.

The New York Times Stephen Holden

Although you wouldn't want an entire movie devoted to such shenanigans, Hotel for Dogs isn't half as zany as it might have been.

Austin Chronicle Marjorie Baumgarten

Hotel for Dogs is a decent family film, sure to please animal-loving kids and their parents alike. Well-acted, the movie also looks good and is stocked with lots of goofy gadgetry.

Entertainment Weekly Adam Markovitz

There are still cuddly pups and piddle jokes aplenty.

LA Weekly Ella Taylor

Slobbery wet kiss of a family movie.

Baltimore Sun Chris Kaltenbach

Look, I love dogs. But this film tried my patience almost beyond endurance.

The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Stephen Cole

It's like flipping through five years of dog calendars.

The average user rating for this movie is 3.1 (out of 10) based on 16 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.

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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Hotel for Dogs DreamWorks Pictures (Paramount)

Hotel for Dogs
DreamWorks Pictures (Paramount)