Having Warner Bros. new Scoob! be the first new major release movie in almost a month should be exciting news. Instead, it’s a major animated nightmare. Scoob! is the ho-hum villain under the mask and the mask is of a movie for families.
Don’t be misled: the movie is horrendous. It’s unfunny, overplotted, badly paced, and the animation is overly bright and tacky. But what’s truly infuriating about Scoob! is its appearance as an all ages film despite being wildly inappropriate for children.
You rightly may be confused. How is this new adventure with wholesome celebrity talents bad for kids? And how bad could it be?
Parents don’t need to be a Velma Dinkley to understand the facts. But suffice it to say, Scoob! is the worst movie of 2020 to date. By far.
Let’s start with the ludicrous story. After meeting when young, best friends Shaggy (Will Forte) and Scooby-Doo (longtime Scooby actor Frank Welker) grow up to be questioned as valuable members of the Mystery Inc. gang.
They soon begin a new adventure when they assist superhero Blue Falcon (Mark Wahlberg) to save the world from supervillain Dick Dastardly (Jason Isaacs). Why is the mystery plot abandoned for a bad sci-fi superhero story instead? We never know.
The movie is missing what makes Scooby-Doo fun
The story is boring and grossly implausible, even for an animated sci-fi fantasy adventure. (And again, shouldn’t there be a MYSTERY in here somewhere? Or at least a children’s boo-riffic ghost story?) Yet it’s no shocker that six people contributed to the story and screenplay. It feels like there’s six different television episodes of six different shows happening all at once.
What’s inexcusable, however, is how the screenplay’s lines and the jokes are specifically written about inappropriate topics for a children’s film. How inappropriate, you ask? It’s worse than you could imagine.
How about them introducing kids to the Tinder dating app? Or, gee, kids love seeing Simon Cowell self-parodying his exploitation of big business. But what about clean-cut kid’s idol Blue Falcon making multiple puns where he’s substituting the f-word?
And these are the tame examples. It gets worse when Dick Dastardly has a phallic joke about his name - which he repeats another five times immediately afterwards. Worse still is when Fred (a miscast Zac Efron) and a female police officer parody meet. After pulling him over roadside, they engage in a few porn film tropes.
Is this supposed to be for adults? It certainly isn’t supposed to be for children. And having any one of these, let alone consistent worsening examples, is unforgivable.
Scoob! is continuously cheap
But that’s not even the worst part. What’s most disappointing is, from time to time, there are glimmers of great, classic elements that makes Scooby-Doo great. The early bowling alley chase scene, for example, is the most entertaining of them all.
It has comedy, suspense, and an authenticity to the wide crossover of Hanna-Barbera characters in the script. That means it feels worse with each new character introduction, each more cheap than the last. (Scoob! is meant to be the start of a Hanna-Barbera crossover animated movie universe. Yikes.)
And here’s the bottom line. Every problem in how the movie has been made comes from how cheap it appears to be. Despite an enormous budget, director Tony Cervone has stripped all heart and warmth from Scoob! and made it the world’s least entertaining product placement.
Don’t believe me? The cross promotion includes references to Harry Potter, DC Comics, Lord of the Rings, and the Oscar-winning A Star is Born. All of these are owned by, guess who? Warner Brothers! It’s not just a film with no purpose, it has less integrity than a Super Bowl commercial.
Theatres have been spared by not screening Scoob!
Scoob! is riddled with annoyance after annoyance. Maybe it’s appropriate something this terribly off-brand and nauseatingly unpleasant to watch skipped movie theatres and went straight to home video.
The celebrity voice talent doesn’t add anything to the characters. So why did they bother paying for A-list talent and then not advertise the cast? Then the aforementioned slow pacing leads to slower animation. The frame rate makes it look like a politically incorrect low-budget 2004 crossover.
Families at home who are waiting to return to cinemas deserve something better to watch than what Scoob! is. It’s a shame that with everything Hollywood has delayed releasing, this is what we have to bide the time.
Nobody should waste a single cent on this animated monstrosity. But you don’t need to be in the Mystery Gang to figure that one out.
Scoob!
1 out of 10
PG, 1hr 34mins. Animated Sci-Fi Fantasy Superhero Disaster.
Directed by Tony Cervone.
Starring Will Forte, Frank Welker, Mark Wahlberg, Zac Efron, Gina Rodriguez, Amanda Seyfried, Jason Isaacs, Kiersey Clemmons, Ken Jeong and Simon Cowell.
Now available for Rental on various services.
