Hotel For Dogs

Don Cheadle stars in Hotel for Dogs. Did he lose some sort of bet to Clooney and Pitt? Did he make a deal with the devil and it’s time to pay up?

Emma Roberts and Jake Austin star as Andi and Bruce – a brother and sister team that has been bouncing from foster home to foster home. Along the way, they have been aided by their social worker, Bernie (Don Cheadle), but the two just can’t find the right home, especially since they are forced to hide their pet dog, Friday.

Poor Friday soon becomes the target of the local dog catcher, who thinks he is a stray, which leads Andi and Bruce to an old abandoned hotel, where a couple other stray dogs are living. Worried that stray dogs all over town are destined for a horrible end, Andi and Bruce secretly turn this condemned hotel into a hotel for dogs.

How many stray dogs can they help?

Will anyone find out?

Hotel for Dogs is a movie that doesn’t elicit any major emotions from the audience. Sure, the dogs are cute and do the kind of adorable puppy tricks and mugging for the camera you expect, but director Thor “Dude, you totally made that name up” Freundenthal presents a bland movie.

In Hotel for Dogs, we don’t feel anything for the kids and the predicament they find themselves in because the situations presented to the audience are cartoonish. The foster parents, Lois (Lisa Kudrow) and Carl (Kevin Dillon), like all of the adult adversaries, are moronic instead of evil, so you never feel Andi and Bruce are in any danger. Then, the audience doesn’t get any compelling drama as you just know everything will work out in the end.

However, worst of all, Hotel for Dogs has a little too much humor about dog poop for me, and maybe too much for most adults. Sadly, this is the writing team’s last, flawed, and failed attempt to get us to laugh.

Hotel for Dogs is rated PG for brief mild thematic elements, language and some crude humor.