The original “Space Jam” is one of the most bizarre films to ever come out of the 90s. Not only was it born out of a series of Nike commercials, but its status as a “beloved cult movie” seems to almost be in spite of itself. Kids nowadays don’t really know it, and ask anyone who’s actually old enough to have seen it as a kid and their reactions will range from “it was bad” to “it was alright.”
Yet, somehow, Warner Bros. has manifested “Space Jam: A New Legacy” into theatres, born out of the sheer desire for money and to show off its unending catalog of intellectual property, sans intellect.
“A New Legacy” stars LeBron James as himself, as he enters a computerized world known as “The Warner Bros ServerVerse” to rescue his son, played by Cedric Joe (), from an algorithm named Al-G Rhythm, played with scenery chewing delight by Don Cheadle. To do this, he teams up with the Looney Tunes to defeat Al-G in a basketball game.
Thankfully, James is more than capable alongside the Tunes. His acting isn’t anything amazing, but he can clearly deliver jokes and emotional lines well enough to get through the script’s lightweight material. Honestly, his best moments come when he’s fully animated and delivers a pretty good vocal performance. The rest of the cast is base level passable. Nobody is given good material here, and basically any moment outside of the “ServerVerse” borders on excruciating, as if the time inside it wasn’t bad enough.
The clear winner in this film, acting wise, is Don Cheadle. The man is not only clearly having the time of his life hamming it up against his greenscreen backdrops but sells every villainous line with the mannerisms of a Saturday morning cartoon villain. He’s, clearly, the only actor who understands what kind of movie he’s in.
It’s worth noting Cheadle is the winner acting wise because the true winner of this film is Warner Bros. themselves. Each and every frame is drenched in product placements for their various franchises, and it becomes headache inducing for even the most optimistic of film fans. Remember the gag in “The LEGO Batman Movie” where Joker found the worst villains in the world, and they were all villains from other WB properties? The reason the concept worked there was because it was small scale, it put the silliness of the concept first, and it never let the idea overshadow the rest of the film.
None of that nuance is present in “Legacy.” Its genuinely startling how much the property placement overshadows the film as it really only takes up the about 30 minutes of the movie. Watching Road Runner dash alongside the cars of “Mad Max Fury Road” or seeing Granny replacing Trinity in the opening scene from “The Matrix” isn’t funny or novel in today’s day and age. Not only because YouTube videos and DeviantArt accounts have been doing this for years, but because there’s fundamentally no point to it. It feels like a time capsule, but not to the 90s nostalgia it so desperately desires, but to that weird time on the internet in the mid-2000s when people wrote fan fiction along the lines of “then Winnie the Pooh and Dracula picked up their guns and went to face Steve Harvey and end the fight they started with Jimmy Neutron.”
Bugs’s entire plot is centered around his desire to get his friends back after Al-G enticed them to leave their home because they were washed up, but why? Yosemite Sam ends up replacing Dooley Wilson’s role in “Casablanca” but there’s no joke to it other than “look at this cartoon in this non-cartoon movie.” Not only is it the laziest form of comedy, but there’s no reason given as to why any of the Tunes have picked their particular worlds to runaway to.
Is it stupid to overanalyze the plot of a “Space Jam” sequel this much? Maybe, but if director Malcolm D. Lee (“Girls Trip,” “Night School”) and the whopping six credited writers, Juel Taylor (“Creed II”), Tony Rettenmaier (“Cabarete”), Keenan Coogler, Terance Nance (“Random Acts of Flyness,” “Omniboat: A Fast Boat Fantasia”), Jesse Gordon (“Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles”), and Celeste Ballard (“Wrecked,” “Sweet/Vicious”), wanted to make this such a huge component of Bugs’s plot, they need to have thought it through.
It’s a perfect example of everything that’s wrong with the film; its just lazy. Repeatedly throughout the movie, it spouts the message of “be yourself” and the Tunes encourage James to “be more Looney” and yet the film can’t even begin to be bothered to summon more than the bare minimum of the anarchy these characters are known for.
The final basketball game is ripe with sports movie cliches and what might just be the most insulting bait and switch ending in the last two decades of cinema for how transparent it is. That’s the biggest disappointment about this new film. Warner Bros. has made films in the past that utilize their properties as a part of the plot without letting them overtake the plot; “Ready Player One,” “Looney Tunes: Back in Action,” “The LEGO Batman Movie,” hell, even the original “Space Jam.”
Yet the film’s story about an algorithm that crafts all of Warner Bros. ideas, trying to get an actor to star in a movie he clearly doesn’t want to be in, and filling a big basketball game with every character it can get just to get eyeballs watching feels painfully shallow and even more painfully transparent. Its hard to believe a film like this got made with nary a shred of irony in its bones. One can only imagine what a film like this would’ve looked like if, oh, it had been directed by someone who knew how to do surrealist, satirical material really well and wasn’t kicked off the project as a director by Warner Bros. *cough-cough-Terence Nance-cough-cough*
Genuinely, this isn’t the worst thing to come out of cinema this year, nor will it be fondly remembered come December. It has a decently good performance from James and a deliciously cheesy one from Cheadle, and the effects are good, even as they border on headache inducing. Yet when the Tunes are turned to CGI and seem to be in pain when it happens, that’s when you lose me; it’s both one of the laziest films in recent memory and also one of the most overwritten, desperate to justify its existence in any way possible. 1.5/5
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