Space Jam: A New Legacy movie review — LeBron James, Looney Tunes team falls miserably short of ’90s predecessor-Entertainment News , Firstpost
The Space Jam sequel could have been a fun, 20-minute extended advertisement that pops up on the HBO Max homepage, and in between episodes of Game of Thrones. Instead, for some reason, this is a film that stretches on for nearly two hours.
When the original Space Jam released in 1996, Michael Jordan was right at the midpoint of a decade that sealed his reputation as arguably the greatest basketball player of all time. Having scored an NBA Championship ‘three-peat’ with the Chicago Bulls in 1991, 1992, and 1993, Jordan did it all over again with the same team from 1996-98 (he took a break in between to play minor league baseball; go figure). So when we saw Jordan in action with Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, and the other Looney Tunes, the sheer audacity and ludicrousness of Space Jam (Jordan leading a team of cartoons in a high-stakes basketball game against aliens) really shone through.
Unfortunately for Warner Bros, Space Jam: A New Legacy does not nearly measure up to the eccentricities, meta-humour or sheer sense of joy of the original film. Even worse, the Looney Tunes themselves play a perfunctory part — at best — in the first half, lost in the haze of advertisements and shoutouts for basically every single prominent Warner Bros intellectual property; Harry Potter, Batman, Superman, and Game of Thrones all receive multiple fleeting references. Very few of these are fun, although I liked the one where Ingrid Bergman from Casablanca says her iconic ‘Play it, Sam’ line, only to see the one and only Yosemite Sam (an iconic Looney Tunes character) responding with his trademark bluster.
How exactly does the movie justify this, you say? With a story that is neither clever enough to sustain itself nor stylistically an outlier — a rogue Warner Bros algorithm called Al G Rhythm (Don Cheadle) kidnaps LeBron and his son Dom (Cedric Joe), and digitises them onto his home, the ‘Warner Bros Serververse.’ To find his son and bring them both back safely home, LeBron must lead Bugs Bunny and the rest of the Looney Tunes team against juiced-up avatars of real-life NBA/WNBA players with superpowers. Oh, and the game is not quite basketball, it is ‘DomBall’, a video game version of the sport with ‘style points,’ a ‘step up’ function that allows for superhuman leaps, and various other ‘cheat codes.’
Exhausted? You better believe it, because by the time LeBron and Bugs manage to get the others on board, you are begging for the actual game to get underway, for the ticker tape of thinly-veiled Warner Bros/HBO Max advertisements to wrap up. It feels an awful lot like one of those ‘crew assembly’ montages parodied by the Rick and Morty Season 4 episode ‘One Crew Over the Crewcoo’s Morty’ (2019), which was an elaborate critique of the heist film. But you know what? Even Rick and Morty (voiced by series co-creator Justin Roiland) make a ten-second cameo here, thereby becoming a part of the same joylessness they expertly skewered in 2019.
The ‘DomBall’ match itself, when it arrives after over an hour of hemming and hawing, is a bit of a letdown. Visually, it manages to be sleek, and the transitions are smooth. Don Cheadle, given the opportunity to play the kind of over-the-top villain he fights in Marvel movies, hams it up gleefully. But ultimately, the same humourlessness that hampers the rest of A New Legacy catches up with the climax as well.
A game of ‘superhero basketball’ featuring a bona fide NBA legend and a roster of evergreen Looney Tunes characters, and yet somehow the overall vibe is that of crushing mediocrity.
It’s a bit of a shame, because visually, A New Legacy has some bright sparks every now and then: the Serververse is basically a fun, kids-friendly version of the video game realm from the Tron films. Al G Rhythm’s character design is eye-catching and suitably futuristic. James, who we have previously seen in films like Trainwreck, is much more natural in front of the camera than Jordan ever was. Despite these advantages over Space Jam: A New Legacy ends up falling well short of its ’90s predecessor because it decided to invest in advertising rather than scriptwriting. Basically, this could have been a fun, 20-minute extended advertisement that pops up on the HBO Max homepage, and in between episodes of Game of Thrones. Instead, for some reason, this is a film that stretches on for nearly two hours.
Bollywood fans of a certain vintage will remember that time in the late 90s and early 2000s when Subhash Ghai decided to place bottles of Coca-Cola in all of his movies. Aishwarya Rai Bachchan and Akshaye Khanna shared a bottle in Taal, multiple bottles kept popping up at inopportune moments in Yaadein. I’m not suggesting a causal link between this move and the concurrent free fall in the quality of Ghai’s films. But I do not think it is entirely a coincidence either.
Space Jam: A New Legacy suffers from a similar ailment. I do not see too many people returning to the film after years (as I returned to the original Space Jam, for example). “Can’t be great without putting in the work,” as James himself says early on in the film — If only the writers of the film had followed their own advice.
Space Jam: A New Legacy is now available in India on BookMyShow Stream.
Rating: *
