Movie Log: Hotel for Dogs

I saw Hotel for Dogs entirely for reasons unconnected with my own interest in the movie -- my two sons had MLK Day off, and we hadn't seen a movie in the theater for a while. And this was the one they picked; they wanted dogs more than Adam Sandler or mall cops. (And I can't blame them.) So I didn't really see this of my own volition, and I probably wouldn't have -- but it's decent enough at what it tries to do, so it's a hard movie to dislike.

You see, Andi and Bruce were left orphans about three years earlier, due to some left-vague event that killed both of their loving parents. (This is a movie that never even whispers the word "orphan," though.) They've demanded to be kept together in foster care, even though they're on the old side of fosterability, at about 15 and 12. They have secretly kept their old dog, Friday, a secret from their current, comically horrible, foster parents, the would-be rockers Lois & Carl Scudder. And then, through a series of seemingly-plausible but deeply Hollywood events, they end up housing several dozen dogs in a decrepit hotel down the street from their apartment in whatever city this is supposed to be. They find friends -- and a very mild love interest for Andi -- along the way, but of course things all go terribly wrong, leading to chases, hairsbreadth escapes, and a big "dogs are special" speech to the media.

It's a movie with an obvious message -- dogs and kids both need love and happy homes -- that it delivers in obvious ways, though it does softpedal the "dogs will be killed in the shelter" point for the benefit of the young audience. (All of the adults in the audience will know that's what's going to happen, but a lot of kids won't realize it.)

The best part of Hotel for Dogs are the Rube Goldberg (Heath Robinson, for those of you on the other side of the pond) devices that the younger of our two protagonists cobbles together to care for the canines while the human cast is away -- they're funny and inventive, and much more care was lavished on them than on the script. But I think I've already said that this is a Hollywood movie for kids, so now I'm just repeating myself. Hotel for Dogs is the perfect movie for a dog-loving tween girl, and quite good for animal fans of any age, as long as that age is under sixteen. For the rest of us, there's nothing obviously wrong with it, and the mostly young cast emotes more-or-less naturalistically.