Scooby Doo is not as bad as you would think, in the way that waking up with a furry mouth tasting of rat faeces and a mild headache after downing two bottles of tequila the night before isn't as bad a hangover as you would expect. In fact if you started watching the film as exactly the right moment after downing the aforementioned bottles of tequila you might believe it to be a work of genius, however that is fairly unlikely and I for one am not about to put that theory to the test.
The plot follows the structure of the cartoon series with Scooby, Shaggy and the gang trying to get to the root of some ghostly goings on at a theme park. A few post ironic twists are thrown in, boy does Scream have a lot to answer for, with the gang all bitching about each other, Shaggy being transformed in the love child of Cheech and Chong and Sarah Michelle Gellar playing a helpless damsel in distress.
The CGI is cheap and cheerful with Scooby looking as ridiculous as the concept of a talking overgrown dog always sounded. It takes a lot of squinting to make the new look Scooby Doo resemble the dog of old but the thought of having non-3D animation must have been too painful for an artistically minded production team to bear. At least the broad slabs of primary colours slapped everywhere mean that you won't fall asleep.
The gags are amiable rather than pant wetting but it never gets too crude and the pace rarely slackens so the 90 minutes pass quickly enough. Scooby Doo provides cheaper entertainment that 2 litres of hard liquor and it certainly beats the feeling of your brains having oozed out of your ears to be replaced be a family of extra pointy hedgehogs.