No Reservations Needed If Checking Out...

It may be your basic thief-trains-monkey-to-steal-jewelry comedy, but there were enough people falling into fountains, food fights and irreverent raspberries in “Dunston Checks In” to keep the 12-and-under set amused.

“It was really funny, but it was probably funnier for littler kids,” concluded Kelli Engler, 11, of Irvine.

For Kelli, the movie’s highlights included the orangutan’s flappy lipped “pffft” salute to stupid adults, his scaling of the high-rise hotel as if it were a palm tree and his soulful, “puppy-dog” eyes.

“I knew monkeys were, like, smart, but I didn’t know they could do all that stuff,” Kelli said.

A cross between “Monkey Trouble” and “Home Alone,” “Dunston” pits kids and animals against a world peopled with adults who are unbearably pompous, evil or kindly but stressed out and distracted by work-family conflicts.

The mischievous boys, Kyle and Brian, live in the Majestic Hotel with their widowed father (“Seinfeld’s” Jason Alexander). His boss (Faye Dunaway) threatens to fire him unless he wins a sixth star for the hotel by impressing a spy from the hotel rating company.

The manager mistakenly believes the spy is Lord Rutledge, the villain who already has killed Dunston’s brother and “can make nosy little boys disappear.”

The boys are on to Lord Rutledge and try to protect Dunston by checking the cigarette-smoking, champagne-swilling orangutan into a suite. Meanwhile, Rutledge and another villain, the militaristic animal-control officer La Farge (Paul Reubens), are stalking the orangutan with a computer and a dart gun.

Amid the jokes, some kids said the references to animal abuse were sobering. “It was kind of sad,” said Michelle Darmofal, 10, of Irvine. “[Dunston’s] brother was dead or something. The bad guy killed him before because he wasn’t doing his job or something.”

Parents may find the one-joke movie tedious, but it is relatively free of scenes that might make them squirm--unless it would be the now-common scene of a male using the toilet, or a scene in the hotel spa where a woman is turned on by her masseur, unaware it is actually Dunston slapping her toweled behind.

That was the funniest part of the movie for 12-year-olds Aaron Eagles of Costa Mesa and Brian Webster of Irvine. Overall, Aaron said, the movie was “pretty good, but kind of boring.” Normally, the boys prefer movies with more action and adventure, but Brian said they chose “Dunston” because “we had nothing else to do.”

Michelle said she and her friends got just what they came for. She said, “We wanted to laugh.”