Hotel Transylvania is the debut feature of Cartoon Network legend Genndy Tartakovsky. It is bursting at the seams with ideas. However, these ideas seem to mostly be coming from the SNL brain trust that this film rests its foundation upon. You’ll find few similarities between this and Tartakovsky’s television work.

The premise of the film is to recycle the monster squad comedies of yesteryear into a fresh package for the new generation. There’s a lot of monster gags derived from transplanting human behavior into monster life in the same way that Osmosis Jones did with intra-human inhabitants, and plenty of snappy camera whips to sell them. There’s also what many will see as an excess of meta-comedy, aimed both at the monster genre in general (“I don’t say ‘blah, blah, blah.’”) and Hotel Transylvania itself (“Did they know we were coming?”). Some of it is quite clever, but it feels relatively safe and does little to differentiate it from the comedy of irreverence found in animated films of this time period.

Here, and everywhere else, the aspirations of the film feel quite low. It seems the filmmakers just wanted to make a film that was a good time for the kids and not a pain for the grown-ups. It seems like a calculated decision to fill such a kid-friendly film with so many names from comedy that dads would be familiar with. Speaking of which, I was mostly not a fan of their work. Sandler and his pack are all individually passable, but the aggregate of them makes the project start to wane. It feels and sounds far too much like an Adam Sandler film than a witty animated feature that both kids and parents alike can enjoy. I will single out Andy Samberg as the lone Sandler acolyte who is absolutely elevating his character far beyond what is on the page (and Steve Buscemi as well if you can count him as one). Both of them add a keen sense of tone and timing to their delivery of the lines, and each in vastly different ways.

From moment to moment, the film never loses you. But if we take a step back and look at the thing as a whole, then you see how little there is to it beyond its opening conceit. The romance between the two teens—different centuries, but both still teens—is something even their target demographic has seen dozens of times before, and so is the friction between father and suitor-of-daughter that follows.