1996’sSpace Jamis a bad movie. Nostalgia has helped obscure this fact, but if you go back and watch it, you can see that it’s a soulless endeavor designed to use the Looney Tunes to pushMichael Jordan’s brand in a family-friendly direction as well as his own resurgence after his failed attempt at becoming a baseball star. But if enough people look back fondly on their childhoods, you can wring a sequel out of it, and so we arrive atSpace Jam: A New Legacy, which tries to inject a bit more pathos into the story (there are shades of another 90s-nostalgia fave,Hook), but it’s still the same idea: celebrate the massively successful NBA star and use theLooney Tunesto make it a kid-friendly vehicle. The only twist here is that Warner Bros. is now part of the branding exercise as they boast their broad collection of IP as if that’s the most important thing in the world to anyone other than a shareholder or a studio executive.
As a child in 1998 Ohio,LeBron Jameslearned that to become great at basketball, he had to give up on distractions like video games. However, his son Dom (Cedric Joe) loves video games more than basketball and wants to be a game designer, much to his father’s chagrin. As this conflict brews, a malevolent algorithm in the Warner Bros’ servers, Al-G Rhythm (Don Cheadle), sees LeBron’s massive following as a way to that recoginition for itself. He invites LeBron and Dom to come to Warner Bros where he then is able to absorb them into the computer and challenges LeBron to a game of basketball. If LeBron wins, he gets his son back and goes free. If he loses, they stay trapped in the “Warner Bros. Serververse.” While Al-G manipulates young Dom and pushes him to improving his game “Dom Ball”, LeBron is forced to team up with Bugs Bunny (Jeff Bergman) and the rest of theLooney Tunescrew, who have been scattered across various Warner Bros’ properties.
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If you’re a fan ofLooney Tunes, you’ll be disappointed to see that yet again they’re taking a backseat to what they do best—clever, anarchic comedy—and meant to fit into the mold of whatever they need to be in the broadest sense possible so thatSpace Jam: A New Legacycan ostensibly be for children. This façade quickly crumbles when LeBron and Bugs are forced to travel to R-rated movies likeMad Max: Fury RoadandThe Matrix, but to Warner Bros (arguably the true auteur of this movie), none of that matters.A New Legacyoperates on the level of some kind of repulsive stew where every flavor has been boiled together in the hopes that you recognize it and that recognition breeds appreciation. Not aLooney Tunesfan? That’s okay, we’re going to dress them up as DC superheroes. Not a LeBron James fan? That’s okay, here’s Pennywise in the background. Not a basketball fan? That’s okay? His son Dom basically “invented”NBA Jam.
And yet for all the properties WB has at its disposal as well as LeBron James, who showed he could do comedy inTrainwreck,A New Legacyis an absolute chore. It takes almost half an hour for the Looney Tunes to even show up, and this after establishing that LeBron is basically the villain of the piece because he wishes his son would play basketball instead of making video games. None of this makes the movie funny or witty or insightful, but there is a lot of “Hey, recognize the thing.” There are no jokes aboutCasablanca(a movie that kids adore and will instantly recognize, I’m sure), but when they travel to that world, you get to see Yosemite Sam, who is short, and LeBron wants players who are tall. That’s it. That’s the joke.
Perhaps we brought this on ourselves with the success of films likeThe LEGO MovieandWreck-It Ralphwhere IP could crossover, but those films at least offered a sound reasoning for those crossovers.The LEGO Moviebasically takes places in a child’s imagination, and LEGO sets have always crossed over among those who have played with the toys.Wreck-It Ralphtakes place in an arcade, so it makes sense for games that are literally in the same location to cross over with each other. But Warner Bros. has now reached the point where they want to celebrate all the things they own as if that in and of itself is some kind of virtue. That’s how you get toReady Player Oneand nowSpace Jam: A New Legacy. It’s just brands on brands on brands on brands as if that is somehow appealing minus any kind of commentary that would even slightly dent the power of those brands.
You can’t even make the argument that WB is simply engaging in “brand awareness” because there are some drop-ins here that signal the studio is deeply unaware of its own (heavy sigh) “content.” In the background of the big basketball game (Al-G siphons in a bunch of other WB properties as the crowd as well as normal people from the real world to raise the stakes) you can see the Droogs fromA Clockwork Orange, who are murderers and rapists. You can also see a nun fromKen Russell’sThe Devilsin plenty of shots, and if you need to catch up on that movie,this article should help. I suppose the hope is that if you mash it all together, it simply serves as crowd noise, but you can’t have it both ways where “Hey, there’s a fun thing I recognize in the background!” and also, “Let me ignore all context of that thing to where it simply exists as iconography devoid of meaning!”
For some, I’m sure this kind of reading makes me a spoilsport. After all, this is LeBron James playing basketball with cartoons, so how seriously should anyone take it? But even on the simplest critique of “IsSpace Jam: A New Legacyentertaining?”, the answer is a resounding, “No.” It may look more expensive than the original and LeBron James is willing to poke fun at himself in a way that Michael Jordan never did, but it’s still a listless, overlong, brand-fetishizing affair that seems designed to appeal to shareholders first and everyone else second. I can’t imagine kids having the patience for this and even those who are nostalgic for the original will likely lose interest. Warner Bros. essentially made a sizzle reel for their IP and thought it was a slam dunk when it’s clearly an air ball.
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