Hotel Transylvania

No one does saccharine like Adam Sandler. The man can be sharp, angry and funny – but when he lays on the sweetness, it’s like drowning in an avalanche of Tate & Lyle. Even in animated form, as the voice of the world’s most famous bloodsucker, Sandler achieves sickening levels of ickiness and so sinks this otherwise pleasurable cartoon romp. He’s Count Dracula, owner of a hotel for ghouls, and on the eve of his daughter’s 118th birthday, he starts to fear that she’ll leave him for the big, bad world. There’s plenty to like: the animation is crisp and the action well designed, and a few of the supporting characters – notably Steve Buscemi’s put-upon Wolf Man – are memorable. But the script – co-written, astonishingly, by former ‘The Day Today’ scribe Peter Baynham – is a morass of lazy father-daughter clichés, and it climaxes with the most stomach-churning song-and-dance sequence this side of ‘High School Musical’.