Let’s face it- the original “Space Jam” was a marketing ploy. It featured a just-back-to-the-NBA Michael Jordan, Looney Tunes, McDonald’s tie-ins, and a bunch of cameos from people having fun for a buck. There was a novelty in it, and that’s how I want to remember it. This? I can’t forget this monstrosity fast enough.
This is first and foremost a chance to satisfy Lebron James’ ego. The “I can do everything MJ can do” thing permeates this entire film, except if his early playoff exit this year, his constant team moving, and micromanaging have proven anything, it’s that he can’t. He not only lacks MJ’s laid-back charms, he’s also a pill.
It’s particularly true in the early going as the opening credits are devoted entirely to reminding us of his accomplishments before portraying him as a hard-working, humorless, task masker of a father. His poor son is meant to be great at basketball, not designing video games as he wants. Lebron will hear of nothing else. How much do you want to bet Lebron will learn what love truly is by the end?
But cliches are actually the best part of the film, which otherwise has Don Cheadle playing a Warner Bros algorithm named Al. G Rhythm who feels slighted by Lebron not wanting to participate in its silly data-picked content so it kidnaps Lebron’s son in order to force him into a basketball game. The only question anyone should be asking is, “WHAT?”
Lebron is soon banished to the tune world where Bugs Bunny tells him that Al has also banished most of the tunes to other universes. Lebron and Bugs must get them back: traveling to Game of Thrones world, DC universe world, Harry Potter world; it just goes on and on, the joy of seeing our favorite toon characters soon overshadowed by a screenplay that does a lot of random hopping around.
It’s a film that seems stuck in the 90’s. Someone should tell Warner Bros. that Matrix spoofs aren’t funny anymore. And an MC Hammer gag? For today’s kids? Or how about making the serververse, the place where all this nonsense is going on, feel ripped off from “Tron”.
When the most updating you do is turning your classic tune characters into 3-D, you know the movie is in trouble. And it really is. Their looniness and fun are zapped- they look like horrifying stuffed animals who have suddenly come alive.
And did anybody realize that the basketball game in question is a rip-off of Sega’s NBA Jam? It has all the special effects and style points and superhuman jumping and shooting. And as if there wasn’t any less reason to care, Al also gets all the WB characters from past movies to be spectators for the game so we have characters from The Mask, Batman, Clockwork Orange, The Nun, all in attendance and it makes for the world’s most distracting costume party
And the Cameos? Holy crap! Lil Rel Howery is no Bill Murray, he’s not even Wayne Knight, and many of today’s basketball players are in the movie but we hardly ever get to see them- they are quickly turned into the freakish CGI Goon Squad, Lebron’s nemesis, with very meager results as to comedy.
Which is what this film lacks so much of. Whether it’s the Tunes being sidetracked by a constantly moving plot or Lebron never really showing the same sense of self-deprecation MJ did, “Space Jam: A New Legacy” proves to be less than the product it once was. About the best thing that could be said for it is that the soundtrack has no trace of R.Kelly.