94 min | PG | May 15, 2020 | Warner Bros. Pictures
Scooby-Doo and Shaggy meet as kids and grow up solving mysteries with the Mystery Inc. gang. Then a cosmic plot pulls them into a superhero crossover with Blue Falcon and a half-dozen forgotten Hanna-Barbera characters. The dog deserves better.
Scooby-Doo and Shaggy meet as a lonely boy and a stray dog on a beach. They build the friendship that anchors the whole franchise. The film spends its first act earning that bond and its remaining acts abandoning it. Scoob! is not a Scooby-Doo movie. It is a launch pad for a Hanna-Barbera cinematic universe, and the dog is the bait.
Will Forte voices Shaggy with a gentle, slack-jawed warmth that lands the early friendship scenes. The animated Scooby leans on the bond between the two, and when the script separates them the film loses its center. Mark Wahlberg plays Blue Falcon as a vain, incompetent legacy hero coasting on his father’s name, and the joke wears thin fast. Jason Isaacs gives Dick Dastardly a theatrical menace that the cartoon villainy cannot support. Gina Rodriguez, Zac Efron, and Amanda Seyfried voice Velma, Fred, and Daphne, and the script benches all three for long stretches.
Tony Cervone directs from a script credited to Matt Lieberman, Adam Sztykiel, Jack Donaldson, and Derek Elliott, and the seams of four writers show. The animation favors a glossy, plastic CGI surface that flattens the hand-drawn appeal of the original cartoons. The character designs keep the iconic silhouettes but render them in a slick studio house style that erases the texture. The action set pieces stack so much frantic cutting and digital clutter that the comic timing drowns. The film looks expensive and feels weightless.
Scoob! mistakes a beloved property for raw material. It takes the gentlest premise in the franchise, two friends in a van, and buries it under a corporate mandate to spin up sequels. The cameos pile on. The mystery vanishes. What remains is a competent-looking product that forgets the small, scruffy charm it spends its opening minutes promising.