Hotel Transylvania 3: Summer Vacation Review - 4 Ups & 5 Downs

3. The Middle Is Kinda Dull

Hotel Transylvania 3 has a surprisingly riveting first act, which effectively sets up Dracula's loneliness and gets the whole family headed on their monster vacation.

The third act meanwhile has a ton of forward-momentum as it delivers a banger of a finale, but it feels as though writer-director Genndy Tartakovsky created his beginning and end first, and then struggled to come up with a compelling middle.

The second act, which is basically Dracula and his fellow vacationers exploring a few exotic lands and working their way through the cruise vacation trope checklist, mostly feels like a perfunctory attempt to pad the story out to 90 minutes.

There are still intermittent laughs and visually impressive moments, but the script just sags once the set-up is done with, and doesn't really pick up again until the final half-hour or so.