Scoob is the newest Warner Brothers animated film based off of the classic Scooby Doo animated series, this new film sees the Mystery gang come together to fight Dick Dastardly (Jason Isaacs) as he plans to find 3 mysterious skulls that could open the door to the underworld and a great treasure.
I was actually looking forward to this movie as I am someone who grew up with a lot of the old Hanna Barbera cartoons as a kid (my personal favourite is Secret Squirrel and Morocco Mole) so I was hopeful that Warner Brothers would craft a fun family ride that does right by that rich legacy of characters.
Sadly however that is not the case as this movie for me was a major disappointment for 2 big reasons:
Firstly the films storytelling feels very haphazard with a lot of characters in what feels like their own storylines pasted together into one movie and the joins feel very grating as a result, you have the Dastardly plot, a plot with Shaggy and Scooby and the Blue Falcon (Mark Wahlberg), another plot with Fred, Velma and Daphne and also the origins of how the Mystery gang met plus other Hanna Barbera character cameos and none of it feels like an organic story with a clear 3 act structure.
And a lot of the time the use of the other Hanna Barbera characters feels like what happened with the recent DC live action films also from Warner Brothers (their form guide is really showing here) where instead of giving us a movie we thought we were going to get a whole bunch of other stuff gets shoved into the movie and distracts you from the movie your watching and as a result I just became more and more disappointed with the film overall.
The other big problem I had is that a lot of it feels heartless, the old Hanna Barbera cartoons had fun and joy to boot as well as a good amount of heart in them that always made them so much fun to watch, I loved watching Dastardly and Muttley in all of their shows, Yogi and the gang hunt for Treasure, the Wacky Races, Secret Squirrel to name as examples.
But here so many of the characters walk around either moping or their sad or their miserable or their arguing and after a while I just got so bloody sick of it and so many family films do this nowadays, these dreary mopey characters who mope around and have a big fight at the 2/3rd mark and then make up for the climax and it just feels so counter to what those characters stood for, yes there were hijinks but they were fun and lighthearted in a positive way and that positivity is sorely missing and it hurts the movie.
So yeah that was Scoob and along with Artemis Fowl and Bombshell this is a Turkey that really let me down, 1 out of 5.
