SCOOBY-DOO 2: MONSTERS UNLEASHED The 2002 summer hit Scooby-Doo was cheesy, redundant and juvenile, which of course means it was fairly successful at recreating the spirit of the original animated series. While not entirely lacking in charm, Scooby-Doo 2 isn't as sure-footed, even though the same director (Raja Gosnell) and writer (James Gunn) are involved. Instead, the worst elements of the first film -- the characters' tedious soul-searching, their obsession with the media spotlight, all those flatulence gags (I don't recall Casey Kasem ever breaking wind on the TV show) -- have been placed front and center, resulting in an exhausting effort that feels twice as long as its 90-minute running time. In this outing, those meddling kids -- Fred (Freddie Prinze Jr.), Daphne (Sarah Michelle Gellar), Velma (Linda Cardellini) and Shaggy (Matthew Lillard) -- and their CGI mutt find their reputation tarnished by a busybody reporter (Alicia Silverstone) even as they're preoccupied with fighting a whole army of misshapen creatures. The big surprise of the first film was Lillard's dead-on Shaggy imitation; here, it's a subplot in which Velma gets a beauty makeover -- trust Hollywood to take the homeliest cartoon character this side of Olive Oyl, cast a real looker in the part, and then play up her hubba-hubba qualities. You also get Peter Boyle making a welcome appearance, American Idol's Ruben Studdard in a negligible cameo, and, funkiest of all, Scooby-Doo in a towering 'fro. "Atomic Dog," anyone? 
CURRENT RELEASES
BARBERSHOP 2: BACK IN BUSINESS This doesn't feel like a sequel to the 2002 hit as much as a continuation, with the entire primary cast returning to protect the establishment from yet another outside threat. In the first film, it was a loan shark who wanted to turn it into a strip joint; here, it's a slick businessman (Harry Lennix) whose ambition to "upgrade" the neighborhood includes opening a chain salon (Nappy Cutz) directly across the street from the venerable family shop owned by Calvin (series star Ice Cube). No better and no worse than its predecessor, this likable, lackadaisical comedy proves more focused than the first film yet lacks much of its comic bite, with even Cedric the Entertainer (as opinionated Eddie) forced to marginally tone down his act. 1/2
DAWN OF THE DEAD George Romero's 1978 Dawn of the Dead has long been hailed by both critics and cultists as one of the few great "splatter" flicks ever made, so expecting anything but harsh words for a rehash would be nothing more than wishful thinking on the part of its creators. But hold on. This new version is that rare bird: a remake that actually succeeds on its own terms. Director Zack Snyder and writer James Gunn clearly knew that simply offering a lumbering retread of the original would be a fatal mistake; instead, it wisely presses forward in its own direction, retaining the mall location but offering different characters, different situations and a different outcome. The result is a crisp horror flick, a fast-paced picture that's exciting, icky and often quite funny.
DIRTY DANCING: HAVANA NIGHTS Just as Patrick Swayze and Jennifer Grey infused the 1987 hit Dirty Dancing with their vibrant personalities and swift moves, so do Diego Luna and Romola Garai provide some lift to this otherwise forgettable "re-imagining." Set in 1958 Cuba, on the eve of Castro's revolution, the film centers on an American student (Garai) who strikes up a friendship with a local lad (Luna) who shares her passion for dancing. The storyline is trivial in the extreme, and the film never establishes its explosive era in any believable sense -- despite some tacked-on moments of chaos, this might as well be set in 1986 Miami as 1958 Havana. Yet Luna and Garai make an appealing couple, while fans of the original Dirty Dancing will be rewarded with an extended cameo by Swayze as a dance instructor.
ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND Scripter Charlie Kaufman (Being John Malkovich) has come up with another mindbender of a movie, an existential drama in which two people (Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet) meet and are instantly attracted to each other, not realizing that they were once lovers who underwent a scientific procedure to have the entire relationship wiped from their memories. For all its smart-aleck shenanigans and dense plotting, this delightfully different movie is no mere parlor trick. It takes a serious look at the value of remembrance and the dangers of monkeying with the mind (in a world ravished by Alzheimer's, a willful desecration of our memories seems downright insane), and its laughs are tempered by a sorrowfulness that dogs every scene. Eternal Sunshine is ultimately an odd sort of love story, a melancholy rumination that's as much about the head as the heart. 1/2
50 FIRST DATES Even many of the folks who don't like Adam Sandler have conceded that The Wedding Singer is fairly decent, with cinema's top-earning frat boy ably subverting his obnoxiousness in pursuit of a sweet romance with Drew Barrymore. This new film features an even more intense love story between the pair, yet this winning hand is repeatedly set down in order to make more room for the sort of juvenile antics that will remind Sandler bashers why they hate this kid in the first place. Meshing Groundhog Day with Memento, this Hawaii-set comedy casts Sandler as an aquarium vet who falls for a schoolteacher (Barrymore) who suffers from short-term memory loss. Lowbrow antics repeatedly get in the way of the agreeable love story. 1/2
THE FOG OF WAR Subtitled Eleven Lessons From the Life of Robert S. McNamara, The Fog of War might reasonably be expected to serve as a mea culpa on the part of the former Secretary of Defense for both the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, a plea for forgiveness for his role as one of the chief architects of the Vietnam War. Yet Errol Morris' latest picture, an Academy Award winner for Best Documentary Feature, proves to be an infinitely more comprehensive -- not to mention more ambiguous -- piece of nonfiction, as McNamara discusses just about every facet of his life yet still remains tantalizingly opaque regarding certain subjects. The film does indeed offer many lessons to mull over, yet the most meaningful one might be the old axiom about history repeating itself: One look at the current mess in Iraq and it's chilling to note how little has been learned by those in charge.
HIDALGO A sprawling mess of a movie, Hidalgo is also the sort of old-fashioned popcorn entertainment that has become increasingly rare on the current movie scene -- and in this case, the pro far outweighs the con. Viggo Mortensen stars as a cowboy who, along with his trusty horse Hidalgo, is invited to take part in a grueling 3,000-mile race across the Arabian Desert, a contest in which most participants perish under the merciless sun and the few survivors must contend with duplicity and double-crosses at every turn. What follows is a rousing adventure yarn that includes breathtaking vistas, worthy comic relief, occasionally terrible CGI effects, a supporting role for Omar Sharif (as the Sheik overseeing the race), and plenty of exciting derring-do in the grand tradition of Indiana Jones.
JERSEY GIRL After losing his wife (Jennifer Lopez) during childbirth and his job following an ill-advised tantrum, a publicist (Ben Affleck) returns to his modest Jersey hometown to raise his daughter (Raquel Castro) with the help of his dad (George Carlin); there, he finds himself attracted to a forthright video store clerk (Liv Tyler, appealing in a role that's pure male fantasy). Despite its uneven humor as well as sentimental moments that recall John Hughes at his worst, Jersey Girl is being promoted as writer-director Kevin Smith's first "adult" film, the one in which he has finally dropped his juvenile antics and made a story that involves real-world characters and real-life situations. My response: Where are Jay and Silent Bob when we really need them?
THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST Many of Mel Gibson's movies have displayed a fetishistic fascination with blood and guts, and this one's no exception. In relating the saga of Christ from his betrayal by Judas through the crucifixion, Gibson has taken the greatest story ever told and turned it into a snuff film. The pacifist teachings aren't even allowed to take a back seat to the beatings suffered by Christ (played by Jim Caviezel) -- instead, they're locked away in the trunk, with Gibson paying them only fleeting lip service. The emphasis is squarely on employing the best visual effects, makeup designs and slo-mo camerawork that money can buy to lovingly reveal every whip mark slashed across Christ's back, every thorn driven into His head, every nail hammered into His flesh. It's Kill Bill for the churchgoing crowd, an unrelenting orgy of evangelical ire that's sorely missing any type of meaningful context.
SECRET WINDOW This dum-dum drama is about an author (Johnny Depp) who's accused of plagiarism, and one has to wonder whether this irony was lost on writer-director David Koepp and author Stephen King (on whose novella this is based). Secret Window is nothing if not a pastiche of past big-screen thrillers, recycling most of its elements from The Shining, Misery, The Dark Half and just about every other King project this side of The Mangler. Yet even such a lazy dependence on been-there-done-that material might have been overlooked had the film managed to trick us with its climactic plot twist; instead, figuring out the "shocking" twist requires even less brain power than completing a word search puzzle in a children's magazine. 1/2
STARSKY & HUTCH Having now appeared together in several films, it might be time to regard Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson as Hollywood's latest certified comedy team, a tradition that's included such twofers as Laurel and Hardy, Hope and Crosby, and Lemmon and Matthau. Like their predecessors, these guys are able to bring out the best in each other, a vital ingredient in making this more tolerable than most movies based on past TV shows. Wilson's Hutch, a rascally bad-boy cop, serves as the perfect counterpoint to Stiller's Starsky, a bungling, by-the-book detective, and this disheveled knock-off of the 70s series works best when the sheer force of their personalities overcomes the shoddy writing. Snoop Dogg is aptly cast as informant Huggy Bear. 1/2
TAKING LIVES Angelina Jolie, whose post-Oscar career is only slightly less humiliating than that of Cuba Gooding Jr., plays an FBI profiler who's been summoned to Montreal to assist in tracking down a serial killer who murders young men and then assumes their identities. Could the psycho be the key witness (Ethan Hawke)? The tough-talking detective (Olivier Martinez)? The guy who simply keeps hanging around for no discernible reason other than to be a suspect (Kiefer Sutherland)? A real cop would have this wrapped up in 20 minutes, but Jolie's detective, only slightly less dim-witted than Ashley Judd's boozing cop from Twisted, seems to be merely one more graduate from the Inspector Clouseau Academy. Taking Lives clearly aspires to be another Seven, but a more accurate title would be One-and-a-Half. 1/2
TOUCHING THE VOID Everest Meets The Eiger Sanction in this "docudrama" about a 1985 climbing expedition in which Joe Simpson and Simon Yates attempted to scale a 21,000-foot mountain located in the Peruvian Andes, only to be thrust into a life-or-death situation. Director Kevin Macdonald decided that the best way to bring this riveting story to the screen was to combine fiction and nonfiction moviemaking, by having "talking head" interludes with the real Simpson and Yates interspersed with two actors (Brendan Mackey and Nicholas Aaron) cast as the pair and reenacting their mountain climbing misadventures. Purists of the documentary form may carp, but Macdonald's approach brings an immediacy to the tale that otherwise might not have been possible.
TWISTED Ashley Judd has made more than her fair share of dum-dum thrillers (Double Jeopardy, High Crimes, etc.), yet Twisted stands out through the sheer fact that it's the worst one yet, a preposterous yarn about a detective who becomes a leading suspect in her own investigation when the victims all turn out to be her former lovers. Accounting for the risible dialogue, the gaping plotholes and the utter predictability of the killer's identity isn't too difficult -- after all, this is scripter Sarah Thorp's first produced credit -- but it's almost inconceivable that the director of this total misfire is Philip Kaufman, the immense talent behind The Right Stuff, The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Henry & June.
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