EVEN THE ABSURD WON’T SAVE IT

The franchise with Scooby-Doo including Shaggy, Fred, Vilma, and Daphne, goes back a long time and featuring long-time fans. The film itself is the target for the younger audiences. An audience that probably doesn’t care that the voice actors have been replaced or that construction of the story.

This movie has blended the old mystery where the gang finds crooks and bandits among the way through puzzles and mysteries.  But originally, this story paves away from that. It ignores the chemistry that the original cast had. It is more open. Not so exclusively targeting the gang itself. Instead we’ve some sort of relationship-extravaganza that played out through friendship, father issues, and the relationship between man and a dog. That’s fine but also drives the plot away from the more interesting part of the concept these characters have. As usual the character is goofy and barely serious. There’s a lot of comedy and a lot of unnecessary pop-references.

The franchise has been a long-lived one and has evolved to different content to different mediums that correspond directly to the audience. This decades-long series of merchandise in games, comic-book, TV-series, toys, and film, it has a strong fan-base that cherishes and appreciates the adventures these characters have. In most, there has been a few live-action during the early millennium but those movies didn’t go especially well as the whole stories didn’t succeed. Mostly animated movies and TV-series have been the ones that fulfilled the audience’s satisfaction.

Animation in this film, is surprisingly good, considering everyone looks like barbie-dolls and everyone is build-up all in a similar way. The tone is light-hearted as again, it is aiming for the younger audience. The voice-acting is decent overall. Mark Wahlberg doesn’t really sell me as a superhero called Blue Falcon. This is early introduced in the film and later on, the hero itself shows up. There’re also many references adults might recognize as well.

It takes a long time before the intended mission for the gang start and the build-up is mostly dialogue that fulfilled with consistent dialogue or even a meaning behind it. There’s a lot of jokes that don’t serve well and it does struggle to find a solid plotline throughout the film.

Many old-time fans of the franchise have criticized this with the lack of originality, as the introduction is more intriguing than the rest of the story,. It tries to adapt to much to the modern audience and culture that it slightly loses grasp of the legacy of this long-lived franchise

It has an absurd message by the end and doesn’t really connect with me as an audience and it falls pale when it comes to storylines and a good story. Instead of a good adventure, it relishes and becomes tedious along the way. It’s entertaining but nothing more. Not even the depth that this franchise has had before. The intelligence and mysteries that made this series popular in the beginning.