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The animated pooch detective returns in
Scooby Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed, which packs a wealth of ghostly villains from the Saturday morning cartoon into one movie. When Mystery Inc. opens a museum exhibit of costumes of their old foes, a new masked foe appears and steals everything--and before you know it, all the costumes come to life, chasing Fred (Freddie Prinze Jr.,
Head Over Heels), Daphne (Sarah Michelle Gellar, TV's
Buffy the Vampire Slayer), Velma (Linda Cardellini,
Freaks and Geeks), Shaggy (Matthew Lillard,
SLC Punk), and the computer-animated Scooby Doo all over Coolsville. It's no better or worse than the first
Scooby Doo movie. Watching live-action scenes that you've previously seen in two dimensions is vaguely uncanny; it's like deja vu turned inside out. Also featuring the weirdly unsynchronized lips of Alicia Silverstone (
Clueless), Seth Green (
Austin Powers), and Peter Boyle (
Young Frankenstein).
--Bret Fetzer
From The New Yorker
More good actors trapped in dogville. Sarah Michelle Gellar and Matthew Lillard, among others, reprise their Scooby-gang roles in this sequel adaptation of the ever-running cartoon hit. As the members of Mystery Inc., they investigate the ransacking of a museum devoted to their past successes. The amateur sleuths of Coolsville and their computer-generated dog have to fight the ghouls, many from the original series, that have come back to haunt them. It's the film's one clever idea. The Pop Rocks look of the movie, bright rainbow-seventies color, is headache-inducing, and the script is just a sugar-fuelled jumble of special effects. Lots of clues, lots of running, and not a lot of fun. -Bruce Diones
Copyright © 2006
The New Yorker