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'Scooby-Doo' just can't find its groove
Matthew Lillard, with the computerized canine in 'Scooby-Doo'
Warner Bros.
Children accustomed to the TV cartoon version might find the feature film, to one degree or another, a stretch.
Adults wandering in cold for a first exposure might watch it from a sufficient distance to notice what an ill-fitting piece of work it is.
The Hanna-Barbera TV cartoon, "Scooby-Doo, Where Are You?," premiered in 1969 and has generated 310 episodes.
It's about four older teenagers — or maybe they're early 20-somethings — who comprise a detective team known as Mystery Inc. They have a talking mascot, the Great Dane Scooby-Doo.
The film maintains Scooby-Doo's animated status, seamlessly rendered through CGI (computer-generated imagery), but it turns the detectives into humans, which struck me as a good idea until it became apparent the choices don't meld as rendered.
Velma (Linda Cardellini), the plain brains of the outfit, is on "a journey of self discovery."
Shaggy (Matthew Lillard), who seems to be the dog's keeper and human counterpart, shares his pet's fears and love of junk food. Fair enough. The film tends to work best when Shaggy and Scooby-Doo are front and center.
Daphne (Sarah Michelle Gellar), the perpetual damsel in distress, rivals Fred (a blond Freddie Prinze Jr.) for most narcissistic.
Fred seems to be the official leader of Mystery Inc. and appropriates credit for other people's ideas, but the movie provides no background on the characters or how they gravitated to each other way back when.
The film begins with them solving a case involving a bogus ghost, then dissolving the business.
Two years later, they're reunited when each of the four is summoned independently to Spooky Island, a variation on "Pinocchio's" Pleasure Island that is described as the new spring vacation hangout of collegians. (Did someone in Florida just exhale?)
They're invited by reclusive owner Emile Mordavarious (Rowan Atkinson of "Bean" and "Rat Race") to figure out why the college kids seem normal when they arrive but leave behaving like drugged humanoids.
Could it be sorcery? The supernatural? Voodoo? (We're told the natives resented the commercialization of their island, a real issue that is mentioned and discarded.) How about clones and brainwashing and … protoplasm?
Can't you see children whirling around in their seats and asking, "Mommy, what's protoplasm"?
Almost everyone is going to get a charge out of Scooby-Doo (voiced by Neil Fanning) — the character, if not the movie. He speaks in someone's idea of a dog's notion of English. Somewhere in the middle of every guttural outburst come two or three human words, often those that have just been spoken by someone else.
And there's a second dog, little Scrappy-Doo, who, I'm told, is a latter-day addition to the series and who is used in a very odd way by the movie.
For me, the picture — written by James Gunn and directed by Raja Gosnell — works at no level.
The point of entry is confusing, and almost nothing is laid out for the uninitiated. The motivation is so poorly engineered out that the final ripping away of masks makes the film's premise evaporate. By the end, nothing make any sense.
The wannabe-hilarious highlight is a contest founded on rude noises. (Do the people who make movies such as this really amuse their own children with flatulence?)
What seems oddest is the marriage of a young child's sensibility, as in a talking dogs' antics, to a group of characters who look old enough to be working on their first "Hamlet."
Wouldn't the people who want to see actors such as Prinze and Gellar expect to find them in a less juvenile context? It's as though they're all caught protracting adolescence to the snapping point.
"Scooby-Doo" — at least this "Scooby-Doo" — cannot lay claim to a "Shrek" or "Simpsons"-like satirical humor. Restless editing doesn't help, either.
The movie feels like a witch's brew of ingredients that don't complement each other.
| 'Scooby-Doo' |
Director: Raja Gosnell
Stars: Linda Cardellini, Matthew Lillard, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Freddie Prinze Jr.
MPAA Rating: PG, for some rude humor, language and some scary action
