Scooby-Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed

Some time back, I wrote this about SCOOBY-DOO: "Perhaps the greatest mystery is how this certain trainwreck turned out to be a fun, enjoyable picture."

SD2, while not a trainwreck, is bigger, louder, and not nearly as much fun. It falls victim to the sequel's standard pitfall: it gives us more and more and more of the same, but it doesn't give us much to hook our imaginations.

Bummer.

PS My child laughed all the way through it, so YSMMV. (Your Spawn's Mileage May Vary.)

Scooby-Doo

Some movies have "disaster" written all over them. Take an old cartoon, mix in some minor-league actors, and modernize the
proceedings with a generous sprinkling of "hip" contemporary references, and you have a movie that can't possibly go right.
SCOOBY-DOO is such a movie.

Perhaps the greatest mystery is how this certain trainwreck turned out to be a fun, enjoyable picture. The picture begins with a sequence straight out of the vintage cartoons, then adds a few twists to generate dramatic tension. From there, it's on to the next mystery and the inevitable, "And it would've worked, too, if it hadn't been for you meddling kids!"

SCOOBY-DOO's cast members sell their roles, it's a pleasure to look at the movie's sets, and the whole thing is much more fun than I'd expected.

What a pleasant surprise!

TMNT

TMNT is too busy to bother with a proper title: an acronym will have to do. Unfortunately, it's also too busy to develop backstory, flesh out characters, or bother to entertain anyone over the age of ten. The result is a horrifically dull action-adventure that will serve the dual temporal purpose of speeding time up for the young 'uns and dragging it out for any parents unlucky enough to wander into this movie.

Here's the setup: the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles have broken up. Paradoxically, Leonardo has gone off to Central America to learn leadership by working alone. Raphael has stayed home in New York, where he also fights crime alone, but this is somehow bad because, well, the never really explains. The other two, whose names I forget, have regular jobs, and all this is, somehow, very, very bad. When Leonardo returns, he essentially has to get the band back together so they can do battle with (a) a band of Ninja that are led by a white woman with a Chinese accent, (b) a bunch of monsters, (c) the reanimated statues of ancient warriors, and (d) a guy whom I assume to be Tiglath-Pileser I.

This could be fun, except for three movie-killing errors. First, TMNT never sets up the turtles properly. It assumes that its audience is already vested in their unity and well-being, which I was not. Consequently, I found the first act to be plodding and dull - this was the character stuff, and I didn't care about the characters. Things picked up a bit in the second act and actually got interesting for a few minutes near the end, but the climax suffered from the next error: computer-generated martial arts fight scenes just aren't interesting. It's fun to watch stuntmen fight, in the same way it's fun to watch dancers perform. But who wants to sit around and watch a CGI Swan Lake? Lastly, the film's third error laid in its choice of aesthetic: the women are so wasp-waisted that their girdles must make breathing impossible. The men are so top-heavy that they shouldn't be able to balance on two legs. And the world is just not interesting. Sorry. It just isn't.

If I had to sum up TMNT with an acronym, that acronym would be SUCKS. Sorry, no time - you'll have to figure out what it stands for on your own.