Scooby-Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed



Hey, look everyone! It's Crappy-Doo!

Okay, so I may not be the intended audience for this movie. I sat through Scooby-Doo (2002) and found basically one scene I liked, the flashback with Scrappy-Doo. There was no scene a particularly liked in Scooby-Doo 2, which puts me in the very uncomfortable position of missing Scrappy-Doo. Scooby-Doo 2 is a lot of not-very-funny jokes and lame character development, supplemented by acting that ranges from bad to annoying. Yes, Matthew Lillard's impersonation of Shaggy is uncanny, but it's just that, an impersonation, and no impersonation is fun to watch for 90 minutes. The only actors who do more than pick up a paycheck or put on a funny voice are the two Buffy alumni, Sarah Michelle Gellar (Daphne, largely sidelined in this movie) and Seth Green (playing a love interest for Velma).


I still find it disturbing to put human eyes in a dog's head.

One thing that really kind of bugs me about all of the new Scooby-Doo projects is the attitude towards the supernatural. In the original series the Mystery Inc. gangs would discover that the ghost or the monster wasn't real. Sure, it seemed like they were a little stupid to never catch on to that fact, because they were convinced every single week that they could be dealing with a real ghost, but in the end they came to the right conclusion. Then later there were some Scooby-Doo projects like Scooby-Doo and the Reluctant Werewolf (1987) that were set in a fantasy world where the supernatural was out in the open. The most recent animated movies, like Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island (1998), are set in the real world and have Mystery Inc. investigating the paranormal again, but Velma is a lone skeptic and invariably turns out to be wrong. The live-action movies have taken an approach that's an odd amalgam of all these attitudes towards the paranormal. Lip service is given to the fact that all their previous cases were hoaxes (the new movie starts with a museum displaying all the costumes of the villains they've unmasked), but things take a turn for the supernatural very quickly and the Scooby Gang doesn't seem very surprised or look for an alternative explanation. The biggest problem with this approach is that the unmasking scene at the end ("And I would have gotten away with it too...") is pretty meaningless unless we find out that the threat is fake.

Posted: Sun - March 28, 2004 at      

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