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.

Take an FBI profiler with no personality, mix in some unconvincing actors, cheesy camera work, add a wafer thin plot and a matzo ball and you have some foul tasting soup. But at least you can digest the soup. That’s not the case with this movie.

The premise is that French Canadian cops fear they have a serial killer on their hands and they lack the expertise to solve the crime so they bring on a FBI profiler to help out. OK, fine. Since when have the French ever admitted they can’t do something? That glaring problem aside here’s a few more.

1) Angelina Jolie can play sluts very well. FBI profilers are not sluts. I can’t get past the sluttishness nature of her character. Please Angelina keep your clothes ON for a change. It’s bad enough we have to look at those wacky wall walkers you call lips.

2) Ethan Hawke can act, but not in this movie. I’m not going to speculate on what was going through his mind but it wasn’t this film. He was miscast here. We’ll chalk it up to a failed experiment.

3) The cinematography work was among the worst I’ve ever seen. Lots of overhead shots that looked down on the actors, lots of shots from the floor looking up at them. Lots of pointless shots that obscured their faces. Yet when it mattered the cameras didn’t seem to be on the action. It wasn’t arty, it wasn’t cute. It was annoying.

4) The only credible conflict was between Angelina Jolie and her French counterpart played by Oliver Martinez. He did act the role of cop not wanting her help. I can’t say she ever did anything to convince me that they needed her.

Survey says we have a problem with this flick. Now, in all fairness here’s some good things.

1) The premise of a killer taking on the life of the person they killed has potential. It’s an interesting what if.

2) It was in color.

3) The soundtrack was decent.

4) Only some of the theater left before the ending. Unfortunately I wasn’t one of them.

5) The film ended with my favorite U2 song.

DVD rental or cable. You won’t miss anything not having it on big screen.

Hidalgo is one of those films that Hollywood refers to as a “inspired by a true story” story. Since the person who inspired it, Frank Hopkins is dead, and has been since 1951, I’m going to presume he had little to no influence on this film. Mr. Hopkins, please cover your eyes for this review is not pretty. My apologies to you in advance sir. I mean no harm.

In the simplest terms this is a goal film and the goal is to win a horse race through the most treacherous terrain known to man. I was surprised to see this terrain did not include Newark at 2am on a Saturday night. Is that not treacherous? Hidalgo is a period piece which seems unnecessary since 80 percent of it is set in the desert. It’s hot. It’s sandy. It’s Iraq. How much has that really changed in the last 100 years?

If the film centered entirely on the race, it might have been OK. The problem is that the motives for Hopkins to win the race are neither clear nor seem worth what he went through. He’s cast as this “I’m in it for the hell of it” kinda guy with a zippy horse. OK, neat. We learn a little bit about Frank Hopkins and Viggo Mortensen does make him seem interesting. But an interesting and slightly amusing Frank Hopkins does not an exciting goal film make.

The other key characters face serious limitations, I wanted more of them but more never came. This is a case where the parts shine individually but fail to gel when pieced together.

Another problem working against this film is that it followed shortly after horse movie, Seabiscuit. In many ways, Seabiscuit filled America’s need for such dramas for the next decade. So maybe I’m a little burnt on the magic horse thing. I’ll be the first to admit that bias.

The good parts about this film include the good looking horse and the believable rapport between Hidalgo and Frank. The special effects were good. A few of the jokes worked well. The cameras were all in focus.

In the end, this film is best suited for cable. When it comes to HBO give it a whirl and save your ducats.

On Sunday night, I saw the Passion of the Christ. I thought about writing a movie review about the film, but words eluded me when trying to describe it. Basically, I’m speechless. For the first time ever, I don’t have a cohesive opinion about something. Paramedics please attend to my mother who is now in a state of shock from the above revelation.

Lots of people are familiar the basic storyline, and the ending is pretty well known so I’ll leave that to everyone else to discuss.

Below is a short laundry list of details about the film that struck me, in no particular order:

1) Blood. There’s a lot of it. How much? Lots. More than any film ever? Not sure, but it’s lots.
2) Violence. I’ve seen more violent films, but this one wins hand down for the length of the torture sequences.
3) Product placement. There were no corporate sponsors for this film, thus there were no products.
4) Trailers. No one wanted their film to appear before this one, so there are no trailers.
5) Latin and Aramaic. Boy those languages are clunky. They sound clunky 2000 years out of context too. Listening to them while trying to follow along with the subtitles was beyond clunky.
6) Romans. They had good haircuts.

In the end, all I know about this moive that lots more people will see it.