Film review: Kids and pooches own "Hotel for Dogs"

Published 6:44 pm Friday, January 30, 2009

The movie “Hotel for Dogs” may have a case of artistic mange, but it’s commercially foolproof: The kids are cute, the dogs are cuter, the dogs outnumber the kids, and the adult world is defeated by truth, justice and Don Cheadle.

The comedy, starring up-and-comer Emma Roberts (Julia’s niece), is about kids, not parents. Andi (Roberts) and Bruce (Jake T. Austin) have been parentless for three years, smuggling their dog Friday from foster home to foster home, always getting evicted after infractions, violations or minor criminal acts.

Social worker Bernie (Cheadle) is so desperate that he has placed the kids with Lois and Carl Scudder (Lisa Kudrow and Kevin Dillon), married rockers who appear to have more fleas than the entire four-legged cast.

These two turn an abandoned hotel into a home for unwanted pups, which offers many opportunities to move the movie way up the yuck scale, usually a sure bet for kid hilarity, but parents beware.