Review : Scooby Doo

The Scooby Doo Live Action Movie : It was bound to happen sometime.

Hello Film fans

Welcome to a brand new year, it's 2014 and with a new year comes new films and new recommendations and reviews.

I'm going to start this year off with a not particularity well appreciated film, but I quite like it. It's the Scooby Doo live action movie with it's own cast for the characters, it's essentially a new version of Scooby Doo done entirely from scratch. This film is an experiment to see if wither or not the idea of doing a live action movie would work.

If I'm being honest, The idea clearly does work because film producers and a director and the cast thought it was a good idea, so why not.

However It takes one thing to convince a bunch of experts to like the idea and get on board with it, It's takes another to get people who loved the cartoon show, to really connect with an audience, especially children  with a new formated version of Scooby Doo, because it's live action.

The plot of the film is this, The Mystery Inc. gang have gone their separate ways and have been apart for two years, until they each receive an invitation to the mysterious and yet quite too good to be true location called 'Spooky Island'. Not knowing that the others have also been invited, they show up and discover an theme park that affects young visitors in very strange ways. Fred, Daphne, Velma, Shaggy and Scooby soon realise that they cannot solve this mystery without help from each other.

Here's a clip.

I think the idea for this film is good. It is however like a cheese burger. The gags and the practical jokes in this are very substantial and are just not funny enough and overall it comes down to insivishant laughter.

The biggest fail with this is that the film itself, starts to loose confidence. You got good atmospheric stuff going on at the beginning, the mystery inc crew are on the case and then they have a fall out and you go 2 years into the future, suddenly it's like the blues brothers and 'lets get everyone back together' which means each character gets their own little cameo piece. round them all up. Then about half way through the film goes 'erm ok, what are we going to do now?' and what it does now is start to fall apart like an exploding building it tumbles to the ground.



The film is very touch and go, and very much like a marmite movie. you either love it or you hate it, it's as simple as that. Having of course said that, the film itself is very well directed. shots such as the still pictured above is a prime example of creating something quite humorously dynamic but not being too much in your face. It's on parshal behalf of the director that this film isn't as bad as a fail as it could have been. If this had been directed by someone less experienced it would of been a weaker and poorer production.

But the bad is out scored by the good for me. I think this film has had a rough patch since it came out and it's actually something that could deserve a lot more attention.

It's a pity that this film is disregarded for daring to be something new, however it just didn't work as well as it could of and people didn't like it.

I like it though.

Overall I will give this film a 7/10.

NEXT : Scooby Doo 2 - Monsters Unleashed. That's going to be fun to review.