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SCOOBY-DOO 2: MONSTERS UNLEASHED The 2002 Scooby-Doo was cheesy, redundant and juvenile, which means it was fairly successful at recreating the spirit of the animated series. While not entirely lacking in charm, Doo 2 isn't as sure-footed; instead, the worst elements of the first film -- the characters' tedious soul-searching, their obsession with the media spotlight, all those flatulence gags -- have been emphasized, resulting in an exhausting effort that feels longer than its 90 minutes. The big surprise before was Matthew Lillard's dead-on Shaggy imitation; here, it's a subplot in which Velma (Linda Cardellini) 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. 
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 steals the film 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
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