I’ve never seen anything quite like it…

The Scooby Doo team has been making excuses for the movie even before it’s been released.  Story after story is covering all the things that aren’t in Scooby Doo.  The short strokes, so to speak, are marijuana, lesbianism and heavy petting.  There was a touch of each, apparently, in the screenplay and in the director’s cut of Scooby Doo. 

Now, my problem with Scooby Doo, and the reason I see it as the worst film of the year so far, is that they have made a deconstructionist version of the cartoon that tries to reconstruct the original cartoon’s tone, but ends up failing on both counts.  How did this happen?  Given all the hedging, I feel bad about slamming the players who would normally be the culprits, because they may have done better work, only to see it emasculated.  That said, Raja Gosnell still does not know how to shoot a chase, neither Mr. Prinze or Ms. Gellar have the look of cartoon characters and the effects swing between expert and hokey with unclear logic.

If you are spoiler sensitive, it’s time to click through to the Windtalkers review on the next page, because I can’t really tap dance around the specifics here.

Thanks.

Whose bright idea was it to take the least ironic of cartoons and to turn it into an irony fest?  Josie & The Pussy Cats was, as a movie, not about the cartoon in any way.  It was really a movie idea that could have been made without any franchise attachment and been pretty much the same.  The picture is borderline, but far more interesting than a “straight” recreation of the original cartoon could have been.  But that’s not what is happening on Scooby Doo.  They try to have it both ways.

The idea of the gang breaking up after what is essentially a prologue, in which they close out a traditional Scooby Doo mystery, is bizarre.  Daphne is a whiny idiot.  Fred is a vacuous narcissist.  Velma is asexual and feeling put upon by Fred’s showboating.  And Scooby and Shaggy remain themselves.  (I don’t really care that Scooby looks NOTHING like the cartoon character… and the Pamela Anderson celebrity cameo doesn’t play like the cartoon because it is so out of context.) 

Where does an audience over the age of 12 go with this?  Where are we supposed to go with this.  I mean, it’s cute and all that James Gunn decided to give life to what he really thinks of the characters, but once you’ve broken the fourth wall on some pretty thin characters, how do you recover?  Answer: You don’t.

The title card tells us “Two Years Later,” which is a pretty good hint that no one is at the wheel.  I know that it’s a small point, but it’s significant.  The characters come back together with some stories of how they spent the two years, but none of them had changed at all.  If the card had said “Two Days Later,” that might have been comic.  But whatever the card says, was there a thought behind the choice?  Why two years?  Why not one year or three years or 20 years?

The one really great Scooby gag in the film is next.  Scooby walking upright in a dress.   Perfect Scooby Doo tone.  But then they screw even that up when Scooby barks at a cat.  I don’t ever remember Scooby Doo barking like a dog in the cartoon… certainly not bothered by cats. 

Anyway… the gang is reunited on Scary Island.  Why Scary Island?  No one is scared.  No one seems to be there to get scared.  It’s MTV Beach House Island with some skulls and tikis.  Now, we all know that the reason for this is that Warner Bros. is trying to get post-pubescent teens to pay money to see this movie.  But there’s a bikini on MTV every day.  Where’s the story telling?  In a picture like Undercover Brother, the Bond-like hide out island of The Man has a self-destruct button.  It’s not just a location, but a piece of the story… there is a pay off, not just some set decoration.

The “story” goes along.   Pot jokes that don’t want to be pot jokes, a love interest for Shaggy, a love interest (male) for Velma and a nearly unfollowable mystery.  We get Velma in a low-cut top, Daphne doing Charlie’s Angels-style kung fu and a freaky interpretation of Scrappy Doo.

The non Scooby/Shaggy trio are all playing against their characters, trying to succeed at being what they are not.  But again… why? 

Now, it might be that the original take was so out there that it would have been great… or at least, tolerable.  Thing is, when I start hearing people on the team talking about the studio cutting it down into something more palatable for little kids, I hear, “salvage job.”  As in, “We’re going to get what we can out of this thing because we know after seeing the film, it’s not going to be the age-cross-over home run we were shooting for in the first place.”

By the third act, everyone is returning back to form after yet another clever idea that goes nowhere.  The souls that have been removed and put in a cauldron  bounce between the characters so we hear the wrong voices and personalities bouncing between them… but it doesn’t go anywhere!!!!  Five minutes of them actually working this gimmick could have been the best five minutes of the movie… but it is just a quickie… another mediocre quickie.

In the end, Velma’s breasts are put away, Daphne has saved herself, but seems satisfied by being a bimbo again and Fred is leading the way.  There is a happy ending, with Fred acknowledging Velma, but it’s by the numbers. 

And of course, there is the power villain… Scrappy Doo.  A gag that is so inside baseball that it doesn’t pay off on any level.  Even the CG is in the final Scrappy sequence is painfully out of character with the rest of the movie, feeling more like the breakthrough CG of Young Sherlock Holmes than the more sophisticated stuff we currently enjoy.

I almost want to see the movie again to be sure that it is as completely devoid of value as I feel it is.   

PAGE TWO:  “My Half-Ass Windtalkers Review”