Hotel for Dogs
If you or your kids have a soft spot for any kind of dog, "Hotel for Dogs" wants to jump in your lap and slobber up your face. Mastiffs, poodles, bearded collies, Boston terriers (go team), and Dobermans are all present and accounted for; there's even a shaggy Italian spinone running through a few scenes. No pit bulls, though - I guess they only get cast in gangster films.
An adaptation of Lois Duncan's 1971 children's book, "Hotel for Dogs" is agreeable Saturday afternoon multiplex piffle - friendly, formulaic, completely harmless. Emma Roberts - daughter of Eric, niece of Julia, and star of Nickelodeon's "Unfabulous" - plays 16-year-old Andi, who with her inventor brother Bruce (Jake T. Austin) lives with a pair of the worst foster parents ever. (They're failed rockers played by Lisa Kudrow and Kevin Dillon, both looking like something the cat dragged in.)
Somehow the kids have kept their Jack Russell terrier, Friday, a secret from the grown-ups in the three years following their parents' deaths; even their social worker (Don Cheadle) is out of the loop. Following Friday into an abandoned hotel, the children discover a few strays, bring in a few more, and then more, until the city's kill-shelter has tumbleweeds rolling through it. Bruce's gizmos make feeding and exercising easy (don't ask where the poop goes), and they get help from other teens both dreamy (Johnny Simmons) and sassy (Kyla Pratt and Troy Gentile).
The dogs make the movie bearable and, for the most part, they're allowed to be dogs. (The kids at the screening I attended especially liked Cooper, a bulldog who eats anything that's not nailed down.) The cityscapes are pastel and unthreatening; the acting broad but pleasant; any sense of actual danger is kept at bay by the film's light after-school non-realism. There's even a nice adopt-a-shelter-dog message only partially offset by the lack of mixed breeds in the movie. (And, again, where are the pit bulls? Have you looked on Petfinder.com lately?)
It's decent family kibble made by people who genuinely appear to like animals. Stick around for the footage of the cast and crew with their own dogs, proof that man's best friend in Hollywood isn't always his agent.
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