Following the success of Trolls: World Tour’s home video release, Warner Brothers decided to move Scoob! to VOD after its initial theatrical release was delayed due to COVID-19.
When the first trailer for Scoob! released last November, it appeared that it would be a fun theatrical Scooby doo adventure for children to enjoy that also played heavily on nostalgia for teens and adults that grew up watching different variations of Scooby Doo. Between the two trailers they actually got me excited to see what they could do with an updated story for scooby and the gang.
Ruh-Roh!
The first 10-15 minutes of the movie were actually pretty fun. They were beginning to capture that classic Scooby Doo feel with Scooby and Shaggy meeting each other and the other members of the gang. This portion of the movie is capped off with a fun callback recreating the classic intro from ‘Scooby Doo, Where are you?”.
The thing I was most worried about going into this movie was the voice cast, specifically Shaggy, however what I thought would be the movie’s downfall is actually one of its greatest strengths, and the voice cast turns out to be really solid throughout this film. I still wish we had gotten Mathew Lillard to voice Shaggy, but Will Forte was better than expected.
Unfortunately, I really have nothing else positive to say about this movie.
After the intro, the movie loses sight of itself very quickly. Within 10 minutes of meeting our grown crew, Shaggy and Scooby are thrown into a superhero adventure with a group of new characters that don’t get any development. Blue Falcon and Dinomutt are fine, not exactly the variations of the characters we are used to but that’s not always a bad thing.
It truly felt like the writers of this movie made a Scooby Doo movie that was trying not to be a Scooby Doo movie. The mystery gang is split up for 80% of the movie and there isn’t even a main mystery to solve. These two core elements that Scooby Doo has had through all these years are completely stripped away from this movie.
Part of the reason this movie struggled so much to form an interesting plot was because it was so busy playing setup. Warner Brothers clearly has plans for some kind of Hanna-Barbera universe, but they sacrificed the main story of this film to set up this universe, which isn’t ultimately the best way to start off your cinematic universe.
Given that the movie is trying to introduce so many new characters at once, the movie jumps around a lot and the random scenes make this movie feel like it drags on forever. The movie is only 90 minutes long and I was constantly checking the clock just waiting on it to end. When the movie finally is in its climax, they tried to do a big emotional scene which had zero payoff because there was nothing to get you interested in this story in the first place.
This movie was very disappointing to me and I honestly can’t recommend it to anyone except young children who I’m sure will love this movie (my 9 year old brother thought it was “amazing”). Personally I would recommend just waiting for redbox or the price to rent to go down and going back to Zombie Island on Netflix if you’re really wanting to watch a good Scooby Doo story.
Rating: 3/10
