Hanna and Barbera are probably rolling in their graves. First of all, let me say that I'm a 25 year old guy (with bad taste) who's been a fan of Scooby Doo since I was born. I've anxiously been awaiting this film since Mike Myers began working on scripts for it years back. I wanna know what the hell happened to his scripts. Although I can't see him as Shaggy (Matt Lillard was perfect in the role), perhaps if they had stuck to Myers' script, the film would have been good instead of the PoS it turned out to be. I promised my sisters' kids I would take them to see it, but after some of the stuff I had heard, I wanted to preview it before taking them (I figured I'd wanna see it again anyway - boy was I wrong!). Turns out it was no worse than the kids' endless viewings of "Dumb and Dumber" on TBS, so I had to sit through this piece of crap twice....what a waste of 3 hours of my life.
First of all, the good things about the film. Matthew Lillard was phenomenal as Shaggy - the movie's only saving grace. The woman who played Velma was also well-cast, though she didn't quite command the same presence Lillard has. Rowan Atkins also gives a good, but small, performance as the owner of the amusement park. The special FX ranged from excellent to abysmally computerized, though Scooby was better animated than I initially expected. And the scene in the castle was beautifully filmed, with a roller-coaster ride of good effects (and one of the only jokes I found amusing - about drinking out of the toilet). The only other joke that I found great amusement in (which flies over the heads of children) is a reference early on to Shaggy being the stoner that everyone's always assumed he is. That's about it for the good qualities, so on to the bad (which I could write a book about).
I could say that Gellar and Prinze were miscast, but after two viewings, I don't think that was the problem. The problem was that they were both badly written/directed. Prinze's Freddy went from being the self-assured leader he was in the show to an ego-maniacal buffoon. Gellar's Daphne became far whinier and self-involved than the character ever was (with the exception of "A Pup Named SD"), which made her far less sympathetic than she should have been. The addition of Scrappy to the cast was a forced and unfunny cop-out. The fact that he's probably the most hated cartoon character of all-time didn't justify using him the way they did (and I'm among his haters).
The script is awful. Bad jokes sporadically thrown throughout the film, which were vulgar and tasteless, made me consider walking out the first time I saw it - and I've never considered walking out on any film I've seen, no matter how bad it was. The farting/belching/peeing scenes were what both audiences laughed most at, though for the life of me, I can't understand why. For them to go to such juvenile lengths to draw laughs, it should prove how bad the script was. And it's a sad commentary on America's sense of humor...the majority of people in both audiences appeared to be around my age.
And then there was the profanity. Daphne utters a line about opening "a can of whoop-ass." Freddy says something about a "byotch." And the villain says he would've gotten away with it "if it weren't for you meddling sons of..." (at which point he's cut off). I use profanity every day of my life so I wasn't offended, but it had no place in this film (and the kids left reciting Daphne's line).
The music is atrocious. With the exception of the David Newman score and around three songs (Simple Plan's "Grow Up," Allstars' "Bump in the Night," and MXPX's "SD, Where Are You?" cover) plus a clever cameo by Sugar Ray (who are far underused), the majority of the songs are insufferable rap songs. Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against rap when you can understand what they're saying. But the rap songs here are garbled garbage. Where's Will Smith when you need him (doing the deplorable, almost-as-bad-as-this MIB II...)? Even the clever lyrics of Outkast's "Land of a Million Drums" (which plays over the end credits) can't justify the intolerable rapping. It also seems odd with their appearance in the film that Sugar Ray didn't write an original song, instead recycling a song off of a 9 month old album (though the song was probably new when they began filming, but still...).
It's really sad that a generation of kids are being exposed to THIS variation of Scooby, rather than any of the classic cartoons - even Scooby and Scrappy-Doo (the most deplorable of all the series) was better than this. And it's sad that such a talented cast was wasted. It's sad that as a hardcore SD fan, I'd give this a two out of ten score (solely based on Shaggy and Velma's performances, otherwise it would be none out of ten). But the saddest thing of all is that they'll probably go on to do more sequels of this caliber...
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