Sarah Michelle Gellar

Chicago Sun-Times critic Roger Ebert admits that he gave one of his worst reviews ever to the original Scooby-Doo. He handed it one star. He gives the sequel, Scooby-Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed, two stars. What he experienced as he watched the new one, he says, "was not the intense dislike I had for the first film, but a kind of benign indifference." In any case, he remarks, his opinion about the movie is probably "irrelevant to those who will want to see it."

Other reviewers are suggesting that the sequel doesn’t live up to the mediocrity of the original. Lou Lumenick in the New York Post calls it "little more than 91 minutes of cheesy special effects in search of a remotely coherent story."

Wesley Morris in the Boston Globe writes that the movie aims "its dim wit at 5-and-unders, insulting them and whoever was foolish enough to take them on the outing."

The dependably contrarian Los Angeles Times critic Kevin Thomas, however, applauds the film as "a special effects bonanza that plays like an incredibly elaborate theme park ride," but nevertheless warns parents who plan to take their kids to see it "to consider whether their offspring are mature enough to recognize when scary, even brutal make-believe is supposed to be all in fun."