Not even Don Cheadle can save this corporate mess of a film.
“Space Jam: A New Legacy” is the basketball-meets-Looney Tunes sequel that comes 25 years after “Space Jam.” It was directed by Malcom D. Lee, who also directed “Night School” and “Girls Trip.” It has six credited screenwriters and premiered in theaters and on HBO Max.
The movie follows LeBron James as he tries to connect with his son Dominic, who is more interested in video game design than basketball. After getting transported inside of the Warner Bros. supercomputer, the rogue A.I. Al-G Rhythm decides that LeBron must play a game of basketball in order to save his son and stop Al-G from taking everything over. Naturally, LeBron recruits the Looney Tunes for his team in order to save the day.
“Space Jam: A New Legacy” is a soulless, awful and inconceivable attempt to shove as many intellectual properties into the audience’s faces as possible. Regardless of the original movie’s quality, this sequel fails in every regard.
LeBron James plays himself, substituting for Michael Jordan. Cedric Joe plays his son Dominic James, while Don Cheadle plays Al-G Rhythm. They all do fine, with LeBron effectively playing himself and Cedric holding his own fairly well. Don Cheadle steals the show for the most part, as he appears to be having the most fun as the computational villain.
The Looney Tunes are mostly voiced by the current cast, with Jeff Bergman, Eric Bauza, Bob Bergen and Candi Milo voicing most of the roles. The main exception is Zendaya as Lola Bunny. She has easily the worst performance in the film, mostly because it’s completely unnecessary. Everyone else does as good of a job as they can, but Zendaya is the only one that brings nothing to her role.
For the most part, the Looney Tunes aspects of the film are fine. They’re better than the first movie’s usage of the characters, but it operates as typical gags and fanfare that feels cherry picked to be the most accessible it can be. There isn’t any freshness or inventiveness to the Tunes; it’s just more of the same, and not in a good way.
The Looney Tunes acting as only a fraction of themselves isn’t even the most egregious part of the I.P. representation in this movie. On a fundamental level, this movie acts as a boring showcase of every Warner Bros. property and film in their catalog. Sequences exist solely to point and go, “Look, it’s ‘Casablanca’ and ‘The Matrix.’ Wouldn’t it be funny if cartoon characters were in those movies?” It offers nothing to the film, serving less purpose than the entirety of “Ready Player One” and its over abundance of references.
It only becomes worse as the movie progresses, with half of the crowd in the big game finale consisting of dollar store knock offs of movie characters. Nothing is left untouched, with every child’s favorite characters like the Droogs from “A Clockwork Orange” and Pennywise from “It” being only 0.1% of the seeable characters on screen.
The movie acts as the antithesis to itself. The main villain is literally an algorithm designed to create the most marketable and audience friendly movies for Warner Bros. Despite that, the film does everything in its power to create that kind of movie by referencing every single possible product that the studio has at its disposal, even when it makes no sense to include any of the characters or franchises that are represented.
This film represents the corporate overreach of studios over the creative visions of filmmakers and cinema. It showcases the death of the art of cinema, only to be left with what will statistically be the most profitable garbage that studios can pump out using only computers. It’s a frightening future where nothing redeemable is left, and everyone online is proving to studios that this is the future they want by happily consuming this product.
Are there any positives to this movie? Well, Cheadle is a good villain, as mentioned before. James is a marginally better actor than Michael Jordan. The animated sequences are well done despite the rest of the movie, and the 3D models of the Looney Tunes are actually pretty good.
But there is nothing salvageable from this film. The soundtrack sucks. The comedy sucks. The cinematography is fine, but boring. The movie drags on for far too long with nothing worth saying. It presents everything that the villain preaches with zero self-awareness, only further proving the point that Al-G Rhythm represents the terrifying future of film.
Finally, the cherry on top is that this movie doesn’t even have a Space Jam. In the first movie, the Space Jam was the basketball game between the Tune Squad and the actual alien team the Monstars, with intergalactic problems for everyone involved. This movie’s basketball game is just a nothingness, as it takes place inside a computer with zero cosmic consequences at all. It’s the exact problem that “Mortal Kombat” had by not having Mortal Kombat.
“Space Jam: A New Legacy” is a miserable experience. The existential dread for the future of film weighed on me the entire runtime as I watched Bugs Bunny and LeBron James try to stop an algorithm from creating the exact kind of movie that I was watching.
“Space Jam” already acted as a corporate film aimed at marketing different brands. But the sequel turns it up to an 11 by making that the sole focus. Inadvertently, they created a soulless product devoid of anything.
If you are able to find even an ounce of enjoyment from this, more power to you. Just know that by supporting this film, you are indirectly telling studios that they can make whatever pile of garbage they want with no creativity behind it whatsoever that people will consume.
It doesn’t even have a good soundtrack outside of the movie.
.5/5 Torches
