Review: Hotel for Dogs

“When I was young, I really loved movies in which kids become empowered,” shares Ewan Leslie, one of the seven producers of this “urban fairy tale.” Leslie’s director Thor Freudenthal and his writers Jeff Lowell and Bob Schooley & Mark McCorkle target a PG demographic with a dumbed-down “family comedy-adventure.” “Hotel for Dogs” is based on a 1971 book by Lois Duncan, author of “Who Killed My Daughter?” and “I Know What You Did Last Summer.” After five foster homes in three years, 16-year-old Andi (Emma Roberts) and 11-year-old Bruce (Jake T. Austin) are siblings in Central City. These delinquents run a scam of peddling rocks packaged inside cell phone boxes, using a hair dryer to fake shrink-wrap the fraudulent merch. They resort to crime to feed the adopted dog they hide from their own handlers, a couple of idiot rockers played by Lisa Kudrow and Kevin Dillon. Teamed up with new pals from the local pet store, the kids trespass into an old posh hotel and set up a safe house for strays, including ones they liberate from dogcatchers. The local pound keeps shortening the time between capturing and killing its dogs. The kids plot an Exodus-like escape across the county line to a “no-kill” shelter. Pro-life parallels between strays and orphans are underlined by Don Cheadle playing a Social Services bureaucrat: as in “Hotel Rwanda,” this savior repurposes a hotel into a refuge. Not really a treatise on euthanasia as canine-cleansing, “Hotel for Dogs” is less clever than the fake fun that the kids concoct for their bored dogs: an indoor thrill ride with big fans blowing into open windows of car doors, and movie projectors showing dogs a passing vista from the road. With Kyla Pratt, Johnny Simmons, Troy Gentile and Ajay Naidu. 100m. (Bill Stamets)