Is Scooby Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed as good as the original?

With the Halloween season upon us its the perfect time to get into the festive spirit by watching a spooky movie. Scooby Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed is one of many potential movies to watch.

The famous cartoon T.V. show adapted into a real life movie in 2002. The success of the first movie gave the producers an opportunity to create a sequel in 2004.

The Main cast includes Freddie Prinze Jr. (Fred), Sarah Michelle Gellar (Daphne), Matthew Lillard (Shaggy), Linda Cardellini (Velma) and Neil Fanning as the voice of Scooby Doo.

Some people did not enjoy the movie as much as others. RottenTomatoes.com gave the movie a score of 2.1 out of 10 and MetaCritic.com gave it a 34 out of 100. However both movies did fairly well in revenue at the box office.

The story follows The Mystery Gangs rise to fame with the opening of Patrick Wisely’s (Seth Green) Museum of Criminology displaying some of the costumes of crooks that the Mystery Gang have previously brought down. During the opening party a masked villain shows up and causes an uproar along with the Pterodactyl Ghost. During all the chaos the Masked Villain gets away with a few of the costumes from the museum. Once again The Mystery Gang is on the case but things don’t turn out so well for them. The news starts to twist their stories against The Mystery Gang and the Masked Villain tries to turn the city against them. As if it isn’t enough, they have multiple ghosts and monsters they’ve previously defeated terrorizing the rest of the city.

From a personal perspective I really enjoyed this movie. It was nostalgic to see a show I used to love when I was younger made into a live movie. I loved how they stuck true to the characters from the original cartoons but added some new dynamic to them as well such as introducing a love interest between Velma and Patrick. The writers also gave the characters their own personal conflicts they each have to deal with.

For a movie made 12 years ago, I thought most of the graphics and CGI (computer generated imagery) were very good considering the quality of technology in computer editing and imagery in the early 2000s. The only aspects of the movie that fell short was some of the comedy. Some jokes in the movie were either a hit or miss but the movie kept up to stay comedic at the same time as spooky.

I would definitely recommend this movie to anyone especially a younger audience around 6-12 years old. There is a little bit of everything for everyone. The movie is intended to be spooky and comedic but there are some underlying themes to it such as action and romance to it as well. Scooby Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed  is a family friendly movie therefore there isn’t anything too suggestive for a younger viewers to see. Overall, the movie was great and is perfect to watch to get into the Halloween spirit.