“Scoob!” was directed by Tony Cervone and stars Will Forte, Mark Wahlberg, and Frank Welker as the title character. It is an attempt to bring the classic Mystery Inc. team to the big screen, focusing on Scooby and Shaggy’s adventure with a superhero by the name of Blue Falcon.
I’ll start with the positives, which are brief. The animation was excellent most of the time. The lighting and colors and characters all were stunning to look at. Also, Frank Welker was born to play Scooby Doo. His voice is spot on and Scooby was a highlight in the film; he was the only likeable character and the only one who was given any respect. Besides those aspects, not much else in this movie is good.
The movie was made by a bunch of talentless hacks who didn’t care about the Scooby Doo characters, and were only working on the film for a paycheck. The writers of this film have written critically disparaged films such as “Playing With Fire,” “Dr. Dolittle: Tail to the Chief,” “Rampage,” and “Alvin and the Chipmunks: Road Chip.” The film felt like it came out of a conveyor belt; it was so fake and processed. It followed all of the Hollywood animated family movie tropes; the movie even ended with a dance sequence.
As I said earlier, the makers of the film didn’t care about the characters. In fact, they despised them and were even ashamed of them. They weren’t confident in the mystery element of the franchise, so they went with a safe superhero movie that was inappropriate to the Scooby Doo lore. All of the human characters felt nothing like they should be. Fred was too stupid, Shaggy wasn’t cowardly enough, Daphne was the leader instead of Fred, and Velma was a Ruth Bader Ginsburg fan who never lost her glasses. The new characters were boring and uninteresting. They tried to make an arc where the Blue Falcon learns what it means to be a hero, but it didn’t work. The villain, Dick Dastardly, was one of the most one-sided, stale, and poorly written villains I’ve seen in a movie in the past few years.
In addition, the setting was unclear. At the beginning where Shaggy is a child, he is using a cell phone that looks similar to Apple’s iPhone 5 (which came out in 2013), and then the rest of the movie seems to take place 10-15 years later. The movie never explains if the film takes place in the future or present, which constantly left me confused and therefore took me out of the movie.
The film was so strange too. Some of the phrases said in the movie were, “toxic masculinity,” “anachronistic,” “a middle-aged man’s idea of a teenage hipster,” and “millennials.” Do these words sound like they belong in a kid’s movie, let alone a movie about a talking dog?
Overall, this movie was pathetic and unenjoyable all the way through, and I strongly recommend to all Scooby Doo fans to not see this disrespectful movie.
Grade: D