Review: Scooby-Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed

Like most movies geared toward kids, Scooby-Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed features a moral about not trying to be someone else. Funny then, that director Raja Gosnell’s sequel tries so hard to be something it’s not, clumsily attempting to graft human emotion and depth onto two-dimensional characters who originated as crudely drawn Saturday-morning filler. As the film opens, our heroes are riding high, attending the gala opening of a museum exhibition showcasing the costumes of their defeated foes. But soon an evil masked figure—exclusively referred to, in the movie’s only smart gag, as the Evil Masked Figure—steals all the costumes, makes them corporeal, and sets them loose on Coolsville. At various points leading up to the climactic unmasking, Fred puts on the role of butch tough guy (“Talking is for wimps”), Daphne attempts to prove she’s more than just a pretty face (“I’m not perfect.”), Velma briefly transforms into a tarted-up sexpot (“Who’s your mommy?”), and Shaggy and Scooby try in vain to become effective members of Mystery Inc. (“Like, run!”). Top-billed(!) Freddie Prinze Jr.’s vacant stare and wooden delivery make him the perfect choice to play the mannequinlike Fred, while wife Sarah Michelle Gellar, who couldn’t be bothered to make a guest appearance on the last season of Angel, plays the shallow, kung-fu-fighting Daphne as if she’s stuck in Season 1 of Buffy. The CGI’d great dane of the title, meanwhile, has surprisingly little to do save use his flatulence as a makeshift blowtorch against a fire-breathing baddie. On the plus side, Matthew Lillard absolutely channels Shaggy with his baked demeanor and Cheshire grin, and Linda Cardellini’s Velma is officially the sexiest nerd on the planet. Mercifully Gosnell and scripter James Gunn finally abandon the idea of emotional complexity for the movie’s final reel, when the Scooby Gang is too busy jousting on motorcycles, surfing on fire extinguishers, and generally behaving like cartoon characters to ponder their raison d’être–which is exactly how it should be.

My Sister Maria

The inevitability of growing old is a touchy subject for most, and even filmmakers with the best of intentions can stumble when dealing with this issue, leaning toward sentimentality or pat portrayals. Not so with My Sister Maria (Nővérem, Maria), Maximilian Schell’s intimate semidocumentary film about his big sister, legendary German actress Maria Schell. The film opens with the first of many staged scenes, in which Maria’s doctor is talking to Maximilian (a noted actor and director himself) about his sister’s declining mental state. It seems the 76-year-old Maria is slowly retreating into the past: Propped up in bed and surrounded by televisions, she constantly watches her old movies á la Blanche Hudson in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane. Using an unnerving yet effective narrative device, the younger Schell combines documentary footage, clips from Maria’s most noted roles, and on-camera interviews between himself and his sister with sequences of various family members portraying themselves in scenes that illustrate what has become of Maria’s glamorous life and sharp intellect. A treasure of German cinema to this day, her career carried her across five decades, stage and screen, Europe and America; Maria won Germany’s prestigious Bambi award nine times, and starred alongside Yul Brynner and Gary Cooper in her American films. But Schell the director is careful to strike a balance between Maria’s earlier highs and her present day lows, never letting his audience lose sight of the fact that his subject is the same person who has experienced both of these worlds. This is reinforced in a staged sequence (assumedly based on real events) in which Maria experiences paparazzi harassment in her current state of deterioration. After a tabloid photographer sneaks into Maria’s remote, snow-covered cottage and snaps a shot of the bewildered former celebrity, the picture is splashed in a local newspaper. When Maximilian asks the housekeeper about Maria’s response to the unflattering photograph, she quotes, “‘Page 3? I used to be on Page 1!’” While this scene has a laughing-while-crying quality, later in the film it seems Maria is officially losing touch with reality. When she sees Maximilian’s character dying in a television broadcast of the America disaster movie Deep Impact, Maria phones her estranged son to tell him she loves him before the asteroid hits. Such scenes show the harsh realities of aging combined with the downfall of celebrity, but the real strength of Maximilian Schell’s portrait comes from providing the brutal honesty that only a loved one can.

Secondhand Lions

If Secondhand Lions serves any purpose in these post-Pixar days, it’s as a retrofied reminder of exactly how far the children’s movie has come recently. Sneaking in one last cute-kid role before he has to start shopping for shaving supplies, Haley Joel Osment is Walter, an introverted 14-year-old forced by his inattentive mother (Kyra Sedgwick) to spend the summer with two distant relatives. His great-uncles Garth (Michael Caine) and Hub (Robert Duvall) are crotchety recluses, spending their days sitting in rocking chairs on the front porch and intimidating the occasional traveling salesman with shotgun blasts. Faster than you can say “tender coming-of-age story,” Walter is discovering his uncles’ swashbuckling past and helping them rekindle their youthful spirit, along the way gaining some maturity himself. It’s a story that demands some epic sweep, but writer-director Tim McCanlies (The Iron Giant) instead imbues his film with an episodic, small-screen feel: Scenes of Garth and Hub’s globe-trotting, hell-raising glory days are recounted in a series of low-rent, wannabe-Indiana Jones flashbacks, and an in-case-you-forgot final-reel montage is just plain condescending, even in a movie geared to children. Although the cast acquits itself ably enough—especially Duvall, who wisely plays eccentric without going over the top—dialogue is a major problem, most notably when Hub conveys to Walter this delusional mantra, er, timeless wisdom: “Just because something isn’t true, that’s no reason you can’t believe in it!” The end-credits visuals, featuring the adult Walter’s comic strips based on his childhood and illustrated by Bloom County creator Berkeley Breathed, seem like a missed opportunity, more compelling in two minutes than anything that came before. Perhaps if these images had been expanded, Secondhand Lions could have given Finding Nemo a run for its sophisticated-kids’-flick money. As it is, though, the film comes off like a long-since-syndicated special that mistakenly found its way into theaters.

Cold Creek Manor

During the rain-soaked finale of Cold Creek Manor, Stephen Dorff screams at Dennis Quaid and Sharon Stone, “You guys should have stayed in New York!” The idea, of course, is that there are some places sophisticates just shouldn’t venture, such as…upstate New York. Or, as in the case of director Mike Figgis, the mainstream thriller. Not that the arty auteur of split-screen experiments such as The Loss of Sexual Innocence and Timecode is completely out of his element: Like those movies, Cold Creek involves a filmmaker, documentarian Cooper Tilson (Quaid). He and his wife, Leah (Stone, apparently on a rebound since she bedded the AOL mascot), move out of the city with their kids, but despite what the film’s trailer suggests, they don’t buy a possessed mansion. It’s merely re-possessed, and they plan to refurbish it in high style while Cooper produces a doc on the house’s history. Soon the manor’s former owner, Dale (Dorff), arrives—fresh off a prison stint, of course—and convinces the couple to let him help with repairs. What follows is a veritable checklist of genre conventions, as Dale’s handyman-from-hell antics escalate beyond just plain creepy to full-on psychotic. From kids in jeopardy to the slaughter of a family animal to a climactic showdown in a raging storm, it’s all here. Richard Jefferies’ script (his first big-screen outing since the Chevy Chase/Jonathan Taylor Thomas vehicle Man of the House) takes its sweet time setting the plot in motion, and Figgis’ suspense-draining atmospherics don’t really help. Only those cinematic cynics who might appreciate watching the shameless scenery-chewing of Dorff and Christopher Plummer (who, as Dale’s bastard of a father, outacts everyone, all while confined to a hospital bed) should venture into Cold Creek‘s 118 laborious minutes. Everyone else should try renting a double feature of The Money Pit and The Ring for an idea of what might have been.