Who would have imagined Adam Sandler making a new film that is not completely horrible.

“Hotel Transylvania 2,” directed by Genndy Tartakovsky and starring Adam Sandler and Selena Gomez, entertains in an era of offensive, unfunny and poorly made Sandler movies.

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This film does not reach the levels of recent Pixar and Disney movies, but it does continue an average, slightly non-pandering children series.

Most of the characters are unexpectedly well-developed and loveable. 

Mavis in particular is a character that has grown, yet keeps important traits. Her arc through the series has been growing up. First she falls in love and now she is having a child.

With this advance toward adulthood, she has become responsible and overbearing. But at the first chance she gets, her inner-child comes out and you see the conflicting motifs.

This film being funny serves as a complete surprise. Sandler, who also was a screenwriter on this project, has become known for a cringe-worthy, bullying type of humor as of late, but “Hotel Transylvania 2” is the exception.

The jokes are all low-hanging fruit, but it is not a deterrence. This kind of humor gives simple laughs and that is all it needs to do. Random and irrelevant humor reaches the whole audience.

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One of the ways this movie fails is with the main plot. Even for the most straightforward of kids films, this is the worst kind of retread.

It is the same thing again. Dracula sees his child growing up, gets scared and overacts. It hits a lot of the same story points as its predecessor, which hurts everything the movie does well.

Stars: 3 out of 5   

Jacob Pierce can be reached at [email protected] or on Twitter @JacobPierce1_DE.