Because of a bet about the box office gross of Jersey Girl I have to wait to see that movie until Monday night. Essentially a friend bet me that Jersey Girl will do under a certain amount and I didn’t want to win just by my 13 bucks so the wife and I went to see Scooby Doo instead.
I’m going to confess my Scooby Doo fanboy nature. This goes back to my childhood. Scooby was just better than Garfield and He-Man. True Spiderman was best of all, but that’s another movie sequel and review.
Once again the zany kids set off to solve a mystery. This time the villain threatens to crumble Mystery Inc, because they are the targets of a smear operation led by a mysterious figure. They face goblins and ghosts and creepy things, oh my! Even more spooky they must face the legions of evil tyrants they unmasked years ago back in the cartoon days. Which by the way, how old are they supposed to be anyway? In the TV show Shaggy was 14, Fred 17, Daphne 16, Velma 15. Ain’t no one in this movie even close to those ages.
There’s some good laughs, a couple of fart jokes, but in the end of the day plot is 90 percent action based. Without fail every 240 seconds there’s another action sequence to wake people up. Shaggy, Scooby and Velma are spot on. Side point, I’m getting used to Scooby looking like a computer generated acid trip.
Watch for the inside joke for adults during the whip cream sequence with Scooby and Shaggy. Hint, it’s got nothing to do with cherries.
Three good things about the movie
1) It kept the hordes of children in the audience laughing.
2) The guy who plays Shaggy is Shaggy. He’s almost too Shaggy.
3) In many levels the sequel surpasses the original. The action this time is better, Scooby seems more natural looking.
Three bad things? Well, if you like the notion of this thing we call Scooby Doo, I don’t think there are three bad things. If you don’t dig on Scooby, you probably won’t like this picture. It’s that simple.
Some of the laughs are cheap shots, but they work in context. All in all an enjoyable flick. Fun for the whole family. It’s not a bullseye masterpiece, but it will probably do the trick for a rainy afternoon.