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Scooby-Doo Disappointing but not completely worthless live-action version of the classic mystery cartoons. The Scooby gang splits up at the beginning after nearly botching a case as the weak point of each group member screws up what they're doing. Two years later, they are brought back together by invitations to Spooky Island, an amusement park that seems to have an adverse effect on people who go there--they become expressionless, cruel, and extremely strong zombies. Of course, the group ends up working together again to defeat the baddie and reform their friendships and Mystery, Inc. On the good side, all of the performers do a good job at portraying their characters, staying relatively true to their cartoon counterparts. Matthew Lillard, in particular, is outstanding as Shaggy--he's got the voice down perfectly, as well as the slouchy posture and facial contortions. Sarah Michelle Gellar plays nicely off her Buffy persona as Daphne, who is always getting captured and having to be saved, but not this time! She's been learning martial arts. And Scooby-Doo manages to not be quite as overproduced as most cartoon and television filmizations. The accent is on comedy, which is admittedly over-crude at times, but elsewhere matches the style of the cartoons. On the not-so-good side, the theme of "friends have to work together and embrace their differences, often including the self-actualization of the formerly overlooked but essential member of the group, or the bad guy will get away with it" has been used in every single movie of this kind. It's getting old! We know this! Just give us the mystery without the message. And the mystery itself was completely untrue to the spirit of the cartoon. I'm starting to sound like an absolute purist--I don't necessarily think that everything has to be exactly like the original, but the filmmakers have matched an awful lot of it pretty well, from actors to sets to haunted castles, etc. Anyway, every Scooby-Doo cartoon mystery seems to be supernatural in origin, but always turns out to be a fake, a man in a mask with a lot of special effects to spook everyone out. But in Scooby-Doo, while the perpetrator is not supernatural, and a lot of his props are man-made robots, the story contains an element of the true supernatural: the monsters steal people's spirits and then inhabit their bodies. This is not explained away by a natural cause, as it would have been by the cartoons. And those were honestly my biggest beefs. Granted, Scooby's animation could have been more realistic, but I think they got what they intended. Whether that was the look they should have gone for is another question. Scooby-Doo was not nearly as bad as I had expected it to be. It's no classic, but it's diverting enough for a lazy afternoon. **1/2 out of **** Page last updated 9/30/04. |
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