Space Jam: A New Legacy

Year 15, Day 83 - 3/24/23 - Movie #4,384

BEFORE: Michael B. Jordan carries over again from "Without Remorse", and I hate to spoil a joke from this film (who am I kidding, I'd love to spoil a joke from this film) but I know that he's here in this film as a cheap joke, he gets accidentally confused with the OTHER Michael Jordan, get it?  The basketball star that was in the first "Space Jam" movie?  It's a cheap joke, but I'm guessing that ALL of the jokes in this film are really cheap.  This film was in theaters during the summer of 2021, which is when I was working at the AMC, sweeping up, that's where I saw bits of this film, but mostly the end credits, and it looked absolutely horrible.  But now it's just taking up space on my DVR and I want to get rid of it - I've been avoiding it, but today it actually serves a specific purpose, allowing me to connect "Black Panther: Wakanda Forever" with some films that are going to get to better films next week, and then to my Easter film. 

It's Day 24 of TCM's "31 Days of Oscar" programming, and today's themes are "'Sea Adventures" (before 8 pm) and "Satire" (8 pm and after).  I'll probably do better with the latter category.  Here's the line-up: 

6:15 am "The Sea Wolf" (1941)

8:15 am "Plymouth Adventure" (1952)

10:15 am "All the Brothers Were Valiant" (1953)

12:00 pm "Ship of Fools" (1965)

2:45 pm "Captains Courageous" (1937)

4:45 pm "Mutiny on the Bounty" (1962)

8:00 pm "Dr. Strangelove" (1964)

9:45 pm "Network" (1976)

12:00 am "The Great Dictator" (1940)

2:15 am "The Producers" (1967)

3:45 am "The Player" (1992)

I've seen six of these: "Mutiny on the Bounty" (I've watched every movie version of that story), and the five "Satire" films.  That gives me 6 out of 11, a positive day that takes me to 124 seen out of 273, up just a bit to 45.4%

THE PLOT: A rogue artificial intelligence kidnaps the son of famed basketball player LeBron James, who then has to work with Bugs Bunny and the Tune Squad to win a basketball game.

AFTER: Yeah, I'm going to stick with "horrible" on this one, there's nothing I saw tonight that made me think anything other than what I thought when I stuck my head into theater 3 back in the summer of 2021. Maybe also "terrible idea" and "overly self-reflexive and commercialized" while I'm at it.  

Look, I warned everyone, back when "Ralph Breaks the Internet" came out back in 2018, and Disney was allowed to put ALL of their princess characters together in one room to interact with Penelope whats-her-name, in a scene that basically amounted to a cross-promotion of at least a dozen other Disney films.  And nobody listened, nobody (but me) complained, they just thought it was a cute idea to get all these characters together from across the Disney-verse and talk to each other.  Somebody needed to call B.S. on this, because the next thing you know, we'll have three Spider-Mans in one universe fighting five villains all at once, who for some reason all come from separate universes.  If you let this continue, Disney/Marvel will do "Secret Wars" next, and the X-Men and Fantastic Four are going to be crammed into the MCU, and it's going to SUCK.

What's worse about "Ralph Breaks the Internet" was the scene where the characters go searching for a fun time on the internet, and they are told by a "reliable" source that there's only ONE site on the internet worth going to, and that's Disney.com.  Really?  Nothing else fun to do on the THOUSANDS of web-sites out there, nobody else cracked that code but Disney, huh?  And the source of this knowledge is a character in a Disney movie - don't you think maybe that the fix is in?  And we're just supposed to let this 90-minute movie turn into a giant god-damned COMMERCIAL?  This was worse than Little Orphan Annie shilling for Ovaltine....

Well, it took a few years, but Warner Brothers decided to shoot back with "Space Jam: A New Legacy", which is nearly two hours of WB sucking its own dick, in similar fashion to Disney.  The digitized version of LeBron James teams up with Bugs Bunny to hunt down the other Looney Tunes, who are somewhere in the worlds of entertainment available on the WB servers - this one's in the DC superhero universe, that one's on the "Mad Max" planet, and another one can be found in the Austin Powers movies.  Gee, what a wide variety of entertainment franchises for Elmer Fudd, Sylvester and Wile E. Coyote to find themselves stranded in!  And don't forget that Warner Bros. also controls the Harry Potter-verse, the Matrix franchise, The Iron Giant, King Kong, The Wizard of Oz, and Casablanca - but that's OK if you do forget, because WB will be sure to remind you. GOD DAMN IT!

(I'll admit, though, I liked all the different characters who appeared as avatars in "Ready Player One", especially in the big battle scene.  But that WORKED, all of the characters were important and part of the battle.  Here, they're mostly background characters, and it's way more shameless.)

This doesn't even make any sense - why are there "worlds" inside the servers of WB?  "Worlds" are fictional, or they're in theme parks, but they're not "planets" inside a digital "universe", they're not THAT kind of "worlds"!   And why on Earth would Warner Bros. allow a movie to even suggest that there's an evil algorithm inside their computers that can take control of people's phones, listen in on conversations, watch people through their cameras, and then suck them into the digital universe, Matrix-style?  OK, we know that last one is impossible, but the previous three are just plain illegal - and this is part of the sales pitch?  Terrible, terrible idea.  Well, at least they admit that the algorithm is controlling all of the franchise films, which means the sequels are all programmed and written by A.I., human screenwriters are no longer needed.  (Sure, it's funny NOW, but give it five years and then check back with me when the entire WGA is out of work...)

I don't get this from LeBron James' angle either, why would he allow himself to be portrayed as such a bad father?  I mean, I get why these aren't his REAL kids, that's an actress playing his wife and the kids don't even have the right first names, that's all to protect his family, sure.  But why is he such an A-HOLE to his pretend kids?  His son doesn't want to go to basketball camp, he wants to go to computer camp and design video games, why can't fictional LeBron let him be who he wants to BE?  Why let him get corrupted by the evil algorithm and be part of the plan to kidnap people and force them to watch a horrible basketball game?  

And WHY the hell does it take so long for the Tune Squad (really, it should be the TOON Squad, I get that they're part of "Looney Tunes", but come on, according to "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?" they're all TOONS. Just me?) to figure out that they don't need to play like LeBron to win, they need to get Looney and play like the cartoon characters they are?  They should have figured that out five minutes into the game, and the fact that they DIDN'T is extremely annoying.

But, what's even MORE annoying is the multitude of Warner Bros. characters that stands court-side during the big game, and stretches off to infinity.  Standing in the crowd are notable characters like the Joker, the Penguin, the Droogs from "A Clockwork Orange", Pennywise from "It" and many more.  Sure, these fictional characters have nothing better to do but stand next to a basketball game and shake their fists violently at everything taking place on the court - even when there's NOTHING of interest happening on the court.  It's THE JOKER.  It's PENNYWISE.  They should be killing people left and right, if they truly are those characters.  And every shot with these characters is incredibly distracting, to have the world's greatest villains within arm's reach of the main characters, drawing our attention away from the game, it's just a terrible idea. 

And then it's so formulaic when LeBron suddenly becomes a better father and decides out of nowhere to, you know, maybe listen to his own son when he expresses an opinion or has an idea what he wants to do with his life.  The reverse-mechanics of making a GameBoy responsible for LeBron losing a basketball game as a child is similarly awful - the suggestion is that once he cut video games out of his life and focused on basketball, he became successful.  Somehow I think growing six feet taller also might have had something to do with it, but call me crazy. 

Wait, I forgot to mention that halfway through the film, the traditional 2-D animated Looney Tunes characters get replaced by 3-D CGI versions of themselves, for no good reason - and they look just awful.  OK, I think maybe THAT'S my least favorite part.  Yeah, it's great to see the Looney Tunes characters again - except for Pepe Le Pew, who for real got cancelled because he's a sexual predator - but God, please, not like this in 3-D CGI.  Is nothing sacred any more? 

If I'm really reaching for something that this film gets right, it's that you just can't kill a Toon, they're virtually indestructible, unless you use that paint thinner "dip" on them, as seen in "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?"  I have in my possession a non-produced screenplay for the sequel that never happened, which was going to be called "Roger Rabbit 2: The Toon Platoon", in which the toons were going to be recruited to fight in World War II, for the simple reason that they were unable to be hurt by guns, bombs or missiles, as seen in nearly every cartoon.  But then the world kind of changed, and mass shootings became more prevalent, and it was decided that the Disney and WB characters probably shouldn't use guns quite as often.  But, please, can't we also find a way to stop making them play basketball?

Oh, well, I hope people are enjoying the NCAA March Madness - I swear my review of a basketball-based movie during the same week is just a coincidence.  My linking led me here at this time, with what I can only assume is some kind of synchronicity-based message from the cosmos.  I don't follow the March Madness tournament, I assure you - the only bracket-based sport we're watching is the "Tournament of Champions" show on the Food Network. 

Also starring LeBron James (last heard in "Smallfoot"), Don Cheadle (last seen in "After the Sunset"), Cedric Joe, Sonequa Martin-Green, Khris Davis (last seen in "Judas and the Black Messiah"), Ceyair J. Wright, Harper Leigh Alexander, Xosha Roquemore (last seen in "The Disaster Artist"), Stephen Kankole, Jalyn Hall (last seen in "Shaft" (2019)), Wood Harris (last seen in "Once Upon a Time in Venice"), Sue Bird, Anthony Davis, Draymond Green, Damian Lillard, Klay Thompson, Nneka Ogwumike, Diana Taurasi, A'ja Wilson, Slink Johnson, Sarah Silverman (last seen in "Don't Look Up"), Steven Yeun (last seen in "Okja"), Ernie Johnson (last seen in "Hustle"), Lil Rel Howery (last heard in "Tom & Jerry")  

the voices of Jeff Bergman (last heard in "Gremlins 2: The New Batch"), Zendaya (last seen in "Dune" (2021)), Gabriel Iglesias (last heard in "Ferdinand"), Eric Bauza (last heard in "Teen Titans GO! to the Movies"), Candi Milo, Bob Bergen, Fred Tatasciore (last heard in "Scoob!"), Rosario Dawson (last seen in "Down to You"), Justin Roiland, Jim Cummings, Paul Julian, 

with archive footage of Ingrid Bergman (last seen in "Autumn Sonata"), Seth Green (last seen in "Weird: The Al Yankovic Story"), Josh Helman (last seen in "Animal Kingdom"), Bill Murray (last seen in "The French Dispatch"), Mike Myers (last seen in "Listening to Kenny G"), Barack Obama (last seen in "Rita Moreno: Just a Girl Who Decided to Go for It"), Michelle Obama (last seen in "Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project"), Naomi Osaka, Ronda Rousey (last seen in "Charlie's Angels" (2019)), Travis Scott, David Stern, Robert Wagner (last seen in "Frank Sinatra: One More for the Road")

RATING: 3 out of 10 screenwriters who should all be ashamed of themselves.