he members of Mystery Inc. are at a crossroads. Having unmasked yet another would-be spook at the Wow-O-Toy factory, the team of teen detectives may split up. Velma (Cardellini) is mad at Fred (Prinze) for taking credit for her plan yet again. Daphne (Gellar) is tired of being the damsel in distress. Only Shaggy (Lillard) wants the gang to stay together. "No, Scooby, friends don't quit," he tells his faithful dog.
But split they do. Shaggy and Scooby (voiced by Neil Fanning) "do what they do best"—go to the beach and eat eggplant burgers with chocolate sauce. Velma heads off to NASA to help with a secret mission and to embark on "a voyage of self-discovery." Daphne sets off to turn her body into "a dangerous weapon," so she never has to be in distress again. And Fred? He's off on a book tour to tout his new autobiography.
But an emissary arrives from Spooky Island with a tantalizing offer: Come to the offshore spring-break retreat and help solve a mystery.
Promised all they can eat, Shaggy and Scooby agree. Imagine their surprise when they arrive at the airport to discover Velma, Fred and Daphne, who have each been hired separately for the same case. Undeterred, each member of the quartet vows to break the case on his or her own.
They are greeted on arrival by they mysterious Mondavarious (Rowan Atkinson), who tells them that he fears the island is haunted. Velma notices that visitors to Spooky Island arrive full of high spirits, but depart like zombies. Something's definitely wrong here.
On their own, the sleuths delve deeper. Velma makes contact with Mondavarious' henchmen. Daphne investigates the local voodoo priest (Miguel A. Nunez Jr.). Shaggy and Scooby discover an abandoned old castle. "This place is, like, uber-creepy," Shaggy intones with a squeak.
Reunited in the castle, the members of Mystery Inc. decide to split up again to explore the darkest corners of the castle. What they find throws into question Mondavarious' true motivations—and puts each of them, in turn, in peril.
Zoinks! Scooby-Don't!
Scooby-Doo is the much-hyped live-action version of the 33-year-old cartoon franchise that is still seen on the Cartoon Network. Filmmakers have two ways to go when adapting a franchise with such widespread familiarity: ironic and campy, as in the Brady Bunch movies, or faithful, as in the Flintstones movies. With Scooby-Doo, it feels like director Gosnell and company started out doing the one, and ended up doing the other. The result succeeds neither as a wink-wink-nudge-nudge homage to the original series, or as a pumped-up big-screen episode of the show.
The movie works best when it retains the knowing sensibility that pokes fun at the show, while remaining true to it. When viewers see Shaggy's Mystery Machine belching smoke, it seems to confirm the long-held suspicion about the character's true predilections—at least until the audience gets the first-ever peek inside the van to discover what's really getting toasted. Similarly, Daphne and Fred share a moment that confirms audience expectations about their true relationship.
But at some point, filmmakers chose to tone down the irony and make Scooby-Doo basically an overblown cartoon, complete with slapstick hijinks, plenty of signature Scooby moments and a villain as annoying as a certain diminutive canine. Gone are scenes that would have lampooned Velma's rumored taste for the fairer sex, for example. Remaining is a bodily gas contest between Shaggy and Scooby. Ruh-roh.
While it's understandable that filmmakers wanted to appeal to the largest possible audience and not offend families, it's too bad that Scooby-Doo couldn't have been edgier, as the franchise is ripe for parody. It's also a curious choice to treat the cardboard plots, characters and situations of the original series as if they were holy writ, translating them reverently onto a 60-foot screen with little alteration, except for the grandiose finale.
Nevertheless, the actors do what they can to flesh out their characters. Lillard is surprisingly effective as a real-life Shaggy, right down to his reedy voice, boneless gait and spacey grin. Cardellini, similarly, captures Velma's quintessential monotone, while concealing her considerable charms under that bulky orange turtleneck—at least for most of the movie. Prinze is as opaque as Fred. Gellar tries to hide her spunk beneath Daphne's ditziness, but her inner Buffy emerges at the end anyway.
