Daphne & Velma (2018) – Review

In the fifth instalment of the Scooby-Doo live-action film series, we get another “reboot” that has its own take on how the Scooby gang first met, or to be more accurate, how two of the Scooby gang first met because you won’t find Fred, Shaggy over even Scooby-Doo in this particular mystery. The big question here is, “Can you have a proper Scooby gang mystery with only 40% of the gang?”

This movie posits the idea that Daphne (Sarah Jeffery ) and Velma (Sarah Gilman) had become best friends via online social media (with Daphne’s parents being globetrotting tech purveyors preventing her from making any real-life friends), but when Daphne’s parents move to Velma’s hometown of Ridge Valley, our lovely redhead thinks it will be great to be meet Velma in person. How wrong she is. Turns out, Velma is a social pariah at Ridge Valley and she immediately shuns Daphne as if the poor girl had the plague.

And just why would her online BFF give Daphne the cold shoulder?

In the previous live-action Scooby-Doo movies, there was always a supernatural element of some sort, but with Daphne & Velma, we return to the “It’s just some dude in a mask” format of the original cartoon. Unfortunately, the mystery we are saddled with is all kinds of moronic. The plot of this movie centres around the strange goings-on at Ridge Valley High where the brightest and most popular kids are being turned into mindless zombies — sadly, not the flesh-eating kind, but more the paste-eating kind — and to prevent being a target, Velma has worked hard to keep her school scores really low. Does Velma warn Daphne of this issue so that she can take proper precautions? Nope, she just acts like a complete jerk for no logical reason and leaves her friend to flounder in ignorance. As an actress, I think Sarah Gilman was a decent choice for the part of Velma, but the film spent way too much time making her unlikable that at a run-time of a mere 75 minutes, we don’t have enough time to get to know the real Velma. The script sets up Velma as this abject coward who only thinks of her own safety, and that is not the Velma I know. I always thought Shaggy and Scooby were supposed to be the cowardly ones.

Velma, the cowardly blogger.

As for the mystery itself, well, there isn’t much going on here either. We learn that Ridge Valley High is sponsored by a tech billionaire named Tobias Bloom (Brooks Forester), who is using the school to beta-test his latest inventions. When the ideas belonging to the brilliant students who get “mind-wiped” are announced as the “latest” Bloom innovations the very next day, it doesn’t take a Sherlock Holmesian intellect to figure out who is behind it all. This puts Daphne and Velma in a very bad light as it makes them look like total idiots. Sure, this is their first mystery together, and one can’t expect them to be in the groove yet, but their bungling around as they futilely try and solve this case just points out how much we miss Shaggy and Scooby-Doo. It was those two who brought that kind of comic relief to the Scooby-Doo mysteries and saddling this aspect onto Daphne and Velma just doesn’t work.

Slapstick comedy, anyone?

So, with the guilty party obviously being Bloom, we aren’t left with much of an actual mystery to solve. The film does try and throw in some random suspects, but none of them are even briefly credible. We have Two-Mop-Maggie (Mickie Pollock), the gruff janitor with a surly attitude, and then we have Griffin Griffiths (Evan Castelloe), who could be taking out the competition so that he can uphold the family legacy of being the top dog at Ridgely Valley High. Next, we have Daphne’s dad (Brian Stepanek) who is revealed to be a stalker of his own child — under the pretense of keeping her safe — and he even goes to the point of floating around the school dressed as the Grim Reaper, making him not so much a suspect as an utter moron and a terrible parent. Now, the movie does try and throw in a twist at the end with the big surprise reveal that tech billionaire Tobias Bloom doesn’t actually exist, that he was a hologram created by fellow Ridge Valley High student Carol (Vanessa Marano). Carol is actually a twenty-six-year-old woman who disguised herself as a senior student/advisor to better monitor her pupils for their ideas because she had become creatively bankrupt.

The plot is a little more Bond villain than I’d expected.

Stray Observations:

• Velma has always been depicted as the brainy one of the group, but her becoming the cliché nerd outcast in high school was not a needed backstory element.
• In this movie, internet shaming becomes part of a school curriculum. Is this idea ridiculous or a portent of things to come?
• One of the students has the idea of a phone making food and this somehow translates into Bloom coming up with a 3D printer that can replicate food. Do the writers not understand that coming up with an idea is not the same as realizing the final product? Many people have thought about teleportation and yet we still don’t have “Beam me up, Scotty.”
• Daphne’s father isn’t just an extreme helicopter parent he must also be a precog to be able to help her avoid random accidents that threaten his daughter’s safety.
• I give the film credit for having two female leads solving the mystery without men giving them a helping hand — Daphne’s idiot dad notwithstanding — but why did the villain also have to be a woman?

And Velma can karate chop lasers?

I liked the dynamic of Daphne being a Fox Mulder, “The Truth is Out There” character, while Velma was her more supportive but skeptical (if not downright cynical) friend, but the film’s forced conflict between them was so contrived as to be pretty much unbelievable. We never get a plausible reason for why Velma would shun Daphne at school because the idea of “I did it to protect you” just doesn’t wash. Knowledge is power and leaving your friend in the dark is more likely to put her in danger than to protect her. Daphne & Velma has been trumpeted as a “Girl Power” movie, but the script does them no favours and though I have no problem with the idea of a Scooby-Doo movie without Scooby-Doo, this was certainly not the way to go about it.

This could have easily been any one of a dozen Disney Channel Originals without it being forced into the mould of a Scooby-Doo spin-off; it could have been an extended episode of K.C. Undercover with Zendaya without much script tweaking needed, and the end result is a movie that is more disappointing than just outright bad and one that I can’t recommend to fans of Scooby-Doo.

You can find all my reviews of the various Scooby-Doo shows and movies collected here: The Wonderful World of Scooby-Doo.