Scooby-Doo (2002)
Rated PG for some rude humor, language and some scary action
Score: 2 out of 5
The 2002 live-action version of Scooby-Doo is one of those movies that could've been great, or at least memorably messed-up. The show and its characters are pop culture icons, the cast they assembled did them justice, and it was written by James Gunn fresh off his Troma days with a script that parodied everything about the show in a manner not unlike The Brady Bunch Movie, aimed primarily at '70s/'80s kids who had watched the cartoon in their childhoods and were now all grown up. It was (no pun intended) gunning for a PG-13, the first cut of the film was reportedly rated R, and the deleted scenes on the DVD are notably edgier and more risque than what made it into the PG-rated final cut. Such a film likely would've been polarizing, splitting viewers between those who think "hell yeah, this version of Scooby-Doo is friggin' awesome!" and those who think "this used to be a kids' cartoon, my God, what have they done?", but it still would've been more interesting than the movie we actually got. So what happened? To make a long story short, the film wound up a mishmash of Gunn's bawdy script and attempts by the studio to sanitize it and make it more of a family comedy, to the point where the actresses' cleavage was toned down with CGI. The resulting clash of tones is evident in the final product, with lighthearted slapstick and Scooby shenanigans mixed with barely-concealed sex and drug humor and genuine peril on the part of the main characters, making one wonder just who this movie was actually made for. Combine that with the slapdash effects work on the monsters and especially on Scooby himself, looking like cartoons in ways that are neither intentional nor flattering, and you've got quite a disappointment.
The film opens with the Scooby gang, the hunky leader Fred (Freddie Prinze Jr.), the beautiful Daphne (Sarah Michelle Gellar), the nerdy Velma (Linda Cardellini), the laid-back Shaggy (Matthew Lillard), and their talking dog sidekick Scooby, breaking up after bringing yet another crook to justice, the tensions within the group -- over Daphne feeling useless, Fred hogging the spotlight, and Velma feeling that she gets no respect -- reaching a boiling point. Two years later, however, the gang is reunited by Emile Mondavarious (Rowan Atkinson), the owner of a tropical tourist resort called Spooky Island where the guests are... changing. It seems that a trip to the island turns one into a douchebag out of an Abercrombie & Fitch catalog who speaks in terrible "teen" slang, while also gaining super strength and a bad temper. As they explore the island, it soon becomes apparent that this isn't just some guy wearing a costume in order to pull off a fraudulent scheme, but rather, that there's something genuinely supernatural, demonic even, happening on Spooky Island, and that Mondavarious knows more than he's letting on.
The place to begin with this film is obvious: the tone. It's clear that the studio and director Raja Gosnell (whose career is one of family films and lighthearted teen comedies) wanted to make this an all-ages affair, but to do that, they had to get past Gunn's script, which is loaded with raunchy humor that wouldn't play well for their target audience. The effort to bowdlerize the script is... imperfect. An extended fart gag designed to play to kids who think farts are the funniest thing in the world exists side-by-side with a character named Mary Jane whose entire purpose is to be the setup for a weed joke (that, and to show off Isla Fisher in skimpy beachwear). We get a bait-and-switch where we're made to think that Shaggy and Scooby are getting "toasted" (their word, not mine) inside the Mystery Machine while the reggae song "Pass the Dutchie" plays, but we also get jokes lifted straight from the cartoon about Velma losing her glasses and Daphne getting kidnapped. We get a body-switching joke that's mostly played for kid-friendly laughs, except for the part where Fred, in Daphne's body, decides that "I'm gonna look at myself nekkid!" I did laugh here and there, but the hits were never really consistent, and were often outnumbered by the misses. The film is gripped with an identity crisis throughout, not knowing whether it wants to be a kid-friendly comedy in the vein of other nostalgic mid-century throwbacks from that time or a raunchy, teen-oriented comedy like the wave of films that American Pie had inspired. Oddly enough, I had memories of another film that James Gunn had written while watching this: The Belko Experiment, which was undone by the same problem of not knowing what sort of film it wanted to be (in that case, a brutal, serious survival horror flick or a satirical horror-comedy), again because it seemed that the film Gunn had written was very different from the film that the studio and the director wanted to make. (Something tells me that Gunn's screenplays work best when he's directing them himself. You hear that, Disney/Marvel?) The makers of this film should've either dumped the script entirely and just wrote a new one with a PG rating in mind, or fully leaned into it and made the sort of ribald, self-aware spoof that he had written. Instead, we got a film that tried to compromise and be everything for everyone, and had no idea what it actually was.
The cast is the real redeeming value here. The standout is easily Matthew Lillard as a note-perfect Shaggy, such that he went on to do the voice of Shaggy for real in more recent cartoons, nailing all of Shaggy's mannerisms from his appetite to his constant fear of monsters. Linda Cardellini also made for an excellent Velma, the girl who pop culture always pigeonholed as "the ugly one" even though she totally wasn't. Sarah Michelle Gellar takes the fact that her most famous role is a badass vampire hunter and milks it for all it's worth as Daphne, who's decided that she's not gonna get kidnapped this time and is gonna learn martial arts in order to defend herself. (It has... mixed results, even if she gets in a fun wire-fu fight scene.) Even Freddie Prinze Jr., an actor not exactly known for much beyond his good looks, proves to be surprisingly inspired casting as Fred, portrayed here as a selfish and egotistical jerk who broke up the group in the first place and has to learn how to genuinely work as part of a team. I wish I could say the same for the dog Scooby, but while the voice acting was on-point, the effects meant to bring him to life... didn't. It is shocking to me that this movie cost $84 million to make, especially given the otherwise commendable quality of the set design and practical effects, as both Scooby and the demons chasing him and the gang look like they'd been pulled out of a contemporary video game, ugly enough that they didn't even reach the uncanny valley. It's a bad artifact of the time in Hollywood when the hot new trend was fully CGI characters (another reason to hate Jar-Jar Binks), and it looks terribly dated nowadays.
The film opens with the Scooby gang, the hunky leader Fred (Freddie Prinze Jr.), the beautiful Daphne (Sarah Michelle Gellar), the nerdy Velma (Linda Cardellini), the laid-back Shaggy (Matthew Lillard), and their talking dog sidekick Scooby, breaking up after bringing yet another crook to justice, the tensions within the group -- over Daphne feeling useless, Fred hogging the spotlight, and Velma feeling that she gets no respect -- reaching a boiling point. Two years later, however, the gang is reunited by Emile Mondavarious (Rowan Atkinson), the owner of a tropical tourist resort called Spooky Island where the guests are... changing. It seems that a trip to the island turns one into a douchebag out of an Abercrombie & Fitch catalog who speaks in terrible "teen" slang, while also gaining super strength and a bad temper. As they explore the island, it soon becomes apparent that this isn't just some guy wearing a costume in order to pull off a fraudulent scheme, but rather, that there's something genuinely supernatural, demonic even, happening on Spooky Island, and that Mondavarious knows more than he's letting on.
The place to begin with this film is obvious: the tone. It's clear that the studio and director Raja Gosnell (whose career is one of family films and lighthearted teen comedies) wanted to make this an all-ages affair, but to do that, they had to get past Gunn's script, which is loaded with raunchy humor that wouldn't play well for their target audience. The effort to bowdlerize the script is... imperfect. An extended fart gag designed to play to kids who think farts are the funniest thing in the world exists side-by-side with a character named Mary Jane whose entire purpose is to be the setup for a weed joke (that, and to show off Isla Fisher in skimpy beachwear). We get a bait-and-switch where we're made to think that Shaggy and Scooby are getting "toasted" (their word, not mine) inside the Mystery Machine while the reggae song "Pass the Dutchie" plays, but we also get jokes lifted straight from the cartoon about Velma losing her glasses and Daphne getting kidnapped. We get a body-switching joke that's mostly played for kid-friendly laughs, except for the part where Fred, in Daphne's body, decides that "I'm gonna look at myself nekkid!" I did laugh here and there, but the hits were never really consistent, and were often outnumbered by the misses. The film is gripped with an identity crisis throughout, not knowing whether it wants to be a kid-friendly comedy in the vein of other nostalgic mid-century throwbacks from that time or a raunchy, teen-oriented comedy like the wave of films that American Pie had inspired. Oddly enough, I had memories of another film that James Gunn had written while watching this: The Belko Experiment, which was undone by the same problem of not knowing what sort of film it wanted to be (in that case, a brutal, serious survival horror flick or a satirical horror-comedy), again because it seemed that the film Gunn had written was very different from the film that the studio and the director wanted to make. (Something tells me that Gunn's screenplays work best when he's directing them himself. You hear that, Disney/Marvel?) The makers of this film should've either dumped the script entirely and just wrote a new one with a PG rating in mind, or fully leaned into it and made the sort of ribald, self-aware spoof that he had written. Instead, we got a film that tried to compromise and be everything for everyone, and had no idea what it actually was.
The cast is the real redeeming value here. The standout is easily Matthew Lillard as a note-perfect Shaggy, such that he went on to do the voice of Shaggy for real in more recent cartoons, nailing all of Shaggy's mannerisms from his appetite to his constant fear of monsters. Linda Cardellini also made for an excellent Velma, the girl who pop culture always pigeonholed as "the ugly one" even though she totally wasn't. Sarah Michelle Gellar takes the fact that her most famous role is a badass vampire hunter and milks it for all it's worth as Daphne, who's decided that she's not gonna get kidnapped this time and is gonna learn martial arts in order to defend herself. (It has... mixed results, even if she gets in a fun wire-fu fight scene.) Even Freddie Prinze Jr., an actor not exactly known for much beyond his good looks, proves to be surprisingly inspired casting as Fred, portrayed here as a selfish and egotistical jerk who broke up the group in the first place and has to learn how to genuinely work as part of a team. I wish I could say the same for the dog Scooby, but while the voice acting was on-point, the effects meant to bring him to life... didn't. It is shocking to me that this movie cost $84 million to make, especially given the otherwise commendable quality of the set design and practical effects, as both Scooby and the demons chasing him and the gang look like they'd been pulled out of a contemporary video game, ugly enough that they didn't even reach the uncanny valley. It's a bad artifact of the time in Hollywood when the hot new trend was fully CGI characters (another reason to hate Jar-Jar Binks), and it looks terribly dated nowadays.
The Bottom Line
I can't deny that a lot of the people involved with this film seemed to genuinely care about what they were doing, but unfortunately, their visions ran head-first into one another and produced a jumbled mess of a movie. While I didn't hate it like a lot of Scooby-Doo fans do(oby-dooby-doo -- I'm so very sorry), my reaction to it isn't much more than a big "meh", with the story of how it came to be and the thought of what could have been both being more interesting than what made it onto the screen.
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