Before watching the movie:
As someone who was not a fan of Scooby-Doo in the early 2000s, my main impression of this was that, if there was a right way to make a live action Scooby-Doo movie, this wasn’t it. The characters looked overly stylized, and the CGI dog was neither cartoon nor real, just a CGI mess.
I’ve since enjoyed some of the Mystery Incorporated reconstructive take on the franchise, and I have enough familiarity with it to know this probably at least isn’t the worst version.
Before watching the movie:
I’ve been looking for this for years. It’s easy to find the sequel, it’s much harder to come across this one. I’m not sure why that is.
The marketing looks like it’s positioning this as “Mr. Bean is James Bond”, but I’m hoping Atkinson will be doing something closer to Blackadder. Some of that hope may be fueled by the idea that if it’s the case, it might find a place as a missing link in my silly theory that Atkinson’s Doctor in The Curse of Fatal Death is a continuation of the Blackadder line, which tends through history to get smarter (though usually of lower station).
Minor announcements:
Before watching the movie:
I’m fairly sure this is the movie I recall coming out at a time when I was too young to be interested in it, but I thought that it was a few years earlier, like 1997 or 98. Still, I definitely remember the title, nothing with that title came out in the 90s, and the summary is about what I remember.
I was surprised by the star-studded cast. Most of them are people I wouldn’t have heard of in 2001, but I know now are big names. I’m not sure if I knew any of them other than Whoopi Goldberg and Cuba Gooding Jr. at the time. I guess I knew of John Cleese and Rowan Atkinson, but I didn’t know they were in this movie.
I also just found out this is vaguely based on It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World, which make sense, because it reminds me of “The Amazing Race” and that movie. Hopefully, it will have better pacing than “Mad World”, which dragged a bit at times from having to support so many characters and generally being long enough to be the only nonmusical film I know of with an intermission.
Yesterday's Movies 