Dunston Checks In (1996)

There is a particular strain of mid-1990s family comedy that existed almost entirely to fill a Saturday afternoon slot, cost very little in the way of genuine imagination, and rely on one high-concept gimmick to carry the whole enterprise. Dunston Checks In (1996) sits squarely in that tradition. Produced by Joe Wizan and Todd Black and distributed by 20th Century Fox under its Fox Family Films banner, the film runs a trim 88 minutes and asks very little of its audience beyond a tolerance for pratfalls and a willingness to find an orangutan in a hotel inherently amusing. The premise, as the tagline cheerfully telegraphs, is essentially a five-star hotel reduced to a three-ring circus, and the film never pretends to be anything more than that. It arrived at a moment when Hollywood was churning out polished but unremarkable live-action family pictures with some regularity, occupying the space between the bigger animated releases and hoping parents would be grateful for the distraction. If you were a child in the mid-1990s, there is a reasonable chance you caught this on television at some point and retained almost nothing from it except a vague memory of a primate causing property damage.

Behind the camera is Ken Kwapis, a director who built much of his career in television, working across a wide range of American sitcoms and comedies. His background in that faster, broader register of performance shows here, for better and worse. The film has the efficient, clean framing of something made by someone who knows how to keep things moving, but it rarely reaches for anything beyond the functional. On screen, the film's real centrepiece is Sam, the orangutan, whose performance (if that is the right word, and in context it probably is) carries considerably more weight than the script deserves. Around Sam, the human cast is a curious mixture. Jason Alexander, fresh from his years on Seinfeld, plays the harassed hotel manager Robert Grant, a role that asks him to react to chaos more than generate it. Faye Dunaway appears as the villainous jewel thief using the hotel as her base of operations, and she brings a certain theatrical gusto to a part that is, on paper, thoroughly throwaway. Rupert Everett rounds out the principal adult cast, and young Graham Sack plays the boy who forms an unlikely bond with the runaway ape. It is, in short, a film where the non-human member of the cast is doing the most interesting work, which is either a testament to Sam or a fairly pointed comment on the material.

For a flavour of what else 1990s cinema had to offer, I have looked at a few other films from the same decade on this blog, including Anaconda and Muppet Treasure Island (1996), two films that could hardly be more different from each other or from this one, which perhaps tells you something about the sheer variety the era produced. And if family-oriented cinema is more your interest, there is also my take on The Hunchback of Notre Dame, which came out the same year and represents the altogether more ambitious end of what 1996 had to offer younger audiences.

A textbook example of a late-90s kids’ film made purely for slapstick. Dunston Checks In is forgettable, formulaic, and shamelessly silly. The plot is a jewel thief (Faye Dunaway, clearly having a laugh) hides stolen goods in a luxury hotel, using a trained orangutan as her unwitting accomplice. Chaos ensues when the ape, Dunston, befriends a lonely boy and starts wreaking havoc in the penthouse suite. It’s all very predictable, with zero stakes and a story held together by coincidence and cartoon logic. That said, the film isn’t completely dead in the water, because Sam, the orangutan, is oddly entertaining. Whether he’s flushing cigars down the toilet, mimicking human behaviour, or stealing the show in nearly every scene he’s in, Sam brings a mischievous energy that almost makes the nonsense worthwhile. Dunaway leans into her campy villain role with relish, and young Erik von Detten does a decent job as the put-upon kid. But the rest of the cast (especially the snobby hotel staff) are stuck delivering tired jokes and over-the-top reactions. It’s not good, but it’s not entirely joyless either. Just mindless, glossy fluff, the kind of movie that aired endlessly on Saturday mornings and vanished from memory by Sunday. Worth a chuckle or two, thanks entirely to the ape. But as actual cinema it barely holds together. A 2-star relic of a bygone era of kids’ comedy.

I think that about covers it, honestly. There is not much more to excavate here, and I am not sure the film would thank you for trying. What sticks with me, though, is that Sam the orangutan genuinely does something that a lot of human performers in films like this fail to manage: he holds your attention without appearing to work at it. That is rarer than it sounds. The rest of Dunston Checks In is the cinematic equivalent of a hotel minibar, convenient, overpriced, and not particularly satisfying, but you can see why someone reached for it at the time. Some films earn their place in the cultural memory; this one just sort of lingered there, uninvited, on a rainy Sunday. No shame in that, I suppose. Just don't mistake it for anything else.

Rating: ★★  | Year: 1996  | Watched: 2025-08-12

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Related on Movies With Macca

More from the 1990s: Lessons of Darkness (1992) · Shinjuku Boys (1995) · Blue (1993) · Cemetery Man (1994)
More family: Alice in Wonderland (1951) · Wonder (2017) · Kirikou and the Wild Beasts (2005) · Anastasia (1997)
More comedy: The Eagle (1925) · The General (1926) · Americana (2023) · The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! (1988)