Dir. Tony Cervone. 94 minutes.
1/5
With weightless, over-designed visuals, gags about IKEA and “The X Factor” that would have been dated a decade ago, and a cloyingly sentimental story, “Scoob!” shows us the origins and early days of Mystery, Inc.
In a peculiar effort at cinematic universe-building, here Scooby and co. rub elbows with characters from “Wacky Races,” “Dynomutt” and other half-forgotten Hanna-Barbera creations. It’s not “Batman v Superman” — more “Blue Falcon v Captain Caveman.” Was anyone asking for this? A surprising number of “real actors” appear, mainly as superheroes, including Mark Wahlberg, Amanda Seyfried, Christina Hendricks and Jason Isaacs. There are also cameos by Ira Glass and Simon Cowell as themselves, both to execute low-effort gags.
Punctuating its garish action scenes with sappy opinations on the power of friendship, “Scoob!” combines “Candy Crush” visuals with an intensity of heartstring-pulling similar to “Schindler’s List.” Early scenes between a lonely Shaggy and Scooby, his only friend, are acutely sentimental. Their dynamic, strewn with hesitant pauses and a lot of doe-eyed mutual gazing, seems almost romantic.
“Scoob!” is one of those prequels that explains everything and nothing at once. We see how Scooby, Shaggy, Fred, Daphne and Velma originally met, and we receive an explanation for why Scooby has the same name as the Scooby Snack, his favorite food. But there’s no explanation for why Shaggy, here a child of the 2010s, would have grown into a 1960s hippie/beatnik. It doesn’t matter if none of it makes sense: whatever algorithm Warner Bros. uses to greenlight movies determined that recognizable franchises plus recognizable actors would be sufficient to turn a profit. Zoinks.
