Space Jam: A New Legacy (Dir Malcolm D. Lee, 1h 55m)

Western civilisation up to and including the codifing of basketball on 15th January 1892, the birth of Mel Blanc on May 30, 1908, the formation of Warner Brothers Studios in 1923, the cinematic debut of the Looney Tunes on April 19th 1930 and the release of the short A Wild Hare on July 27, 1940, the formation of Nike on 25th January 1964, the birth of Michael Jordan on February 17, 1963 and finally the ad campaign for the Air Jordan VII, leading to the "Hare Jordan" ad spot during halftime at SuperBowl XXVI on January 26, 1992...was a mistake. All of it. The entire 129 years that lead us to this moment, were all mistakes, cosmic ticks of the second hand towards its most unfortunate creation.

For, twenty five years after the original comes, like a beast slouching towards Burbank to be born, a sequel to Space Jam. What follows, as LeBron James, the undeniable king of modern basketball tries to step into the shoes of its undeniable god, is the summation of every exorable modern trend in cinema, in a at turns horrifying, saddening, and downright disturbing bricolage of cinematic millaise, a veritable living, breathing example of cinema's self-cannibalism, its obsession with pop-culture, and an entire studio disgorging nearly 120 years of IP in service to a weakly written, logistically and culturally horrifying sequel to a glorified advert. All I can say is: "Y'all ready for this?"  

The year is 1992. The Washington Redskins are leading the Buffalo Bills 17-0 at Superbowl XXVI, in a lacklustre game in a chilly Minneapolis. We go to a half-time break, and from this utterly bland game, we are transported to the basketball court as two colossal personalities meet for the first time. Michael Jordan, already on the way to becoming a legend with two back-to-back MVP trophies and NBA championships under his belt, and Bugs Bunny (Billy West), a cultural icon only second to Mickey Mouse in his familarity to generations of children around the world.  One could write an entire book about the way that the "Hare Jordan" advert changed marketing, the back and forth tug of war between American football and basketball, animation, sneakerhead fandom, the profile of black athletes and beyond. What's important though, is this. Bugs Bunny was still relevant. The "beautiful friendship" that Bugs hints at at the end of the advert is about to bear fruit.

Four years later, Space Jam hits cinema. Up till this point, Warner Bros' animation department have essentially bundled shorts together into package films like The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Movie (1979) or The Looney Tunes Hall of Fame (1991). Whilst the team have produced straight to video films like Tiny Toon Adventures, and whilst the success of Who Framed Roger Rabbit proves that 2D and live action can work well together, Space Jam still remains a remarkably innovative, and enjoyable film. Much of this has to do with the way that it's structured, using Jordan's break from the sport after the death of his father, and still headscratching move into baseball as a real-life springboard into cartoon adventures.

All of this, of course, takes place whilst giving both Jordan and Bunny an odd-couple vibe whilst both essentially play to their strengths-Bugs as comedic foil to the straight-laced, court-centric Jordan as they take on an alien menace in the form of the Mon-Stars. It remains, at time of writing, somewhat unsurprisingly the highest grossing basketball film of all time. It's not an especially good film-Jordan is far from a spectacular actor, and the Looney Tunes themselves are on their b-game in terms of gags, but it is a happy compromise between the worlds of basketball and the Looney Tunes. It's a charming slice of the 1990s. And then we waited.

As early as 1996, Jordan was approached to appear in a sequel, but by now, he was back to basketball, and so, Warner Bros looked elsewhere. Spy Jam with Jackie Chan? Or maybe Race Jam, with NASCAR's Jeff Gordon. Even Skate Jam, with Tony Hawk was dicussed. All of these went, unsurprisingly, nowhere, with the exception of Spy Jam, eventually spun off into Looney Tunes Back in Action, the illfated but enjoyable Joe Dante spy flick. With no offence to Messrs Chan, Gordon, and Hawk, they were not Michael Jordan, were not in the same league as Michael Jordan, and the Looney Tunes themselves couldn't carry a movie. So we waited for a new Jordan, or someone to even surpass him. The Looney Tunes, on the other hand, returned to what they did best, with several warmly recieved series smartly modernising the formula.

Enter Lebron James. Like Jordan, he is phenomeonally successful, a four time champion and MVP. Like Jordan, Lebron is bigger than his sport, a one-word-only icon of basketball and beyond. Like Jordan, Lebron is a figure with a legacy even before he's retired. It's not  so much that he's the most obvious choice to step into the role and succeed Jordan, it's that he's the only choice. Moreover, unlike Jordan, LeBron has, admittedly largely as himself, acting (and indeed), voice-acting experience. In short, LeBron is a perfect replacement at least, conceptually, for Jordan. And thus, in late 2018, Space Jam 2, starring LeBron James was announced.

And it's here, three years later, as we scurry hurriedly past glimpses into the abyss through trailers and sneak peaks over the last six months, that Space Jam: A New Legacy crashes into cinema, with all the grace and poise and welcomness of a 18-wheeler truck piling through the wall of the conceptual multiplex, coming to rest stuck somewhere between the foyer and the screens. The doors creak open, the dust falls slowly as they shut off the engine. Lebron and Bugs hop down from the cab, dust themselves down, unload their precious cargo, and purposefully head to the projection room, as the bizarro world of Space Jam: A New Legacy is unleashed into ours, its acursed energy only matched in the last two decades by 2019's Cats and 2017's The Emoji Movie.

Where SJ2 does work, in all honesty, is LeBron himself; the opening of the film follows the structure of the original almost slavishly, with a short prologue with a younger version of the respective basketball player. But where the young Jordan is supported by his father into the dunk that opens the original film's ESPN 30 for 30 style montage, the young LeBron is fleshed out far more, and the conflict between gaming and basketball instantly introduced before the titles. From his introduction, to having to put away the childish things of the Game Boy that briefly distracts him from the game that he then fails to win, to become the sportsman his family and coach want him to be, the fictionalised LeBron is far from the faultless, if rudderless Jordan of the wilderness years between stints in the Chicago Balls, but a comparatively flawed figure. Cue opening montage.

From here, we get the adult LeBron, we're quickly introduced to his family, in particular his two sons, who essentially represent the drive forward of the current LeBron, of becoming the start of a lineage in basketball, via his elder son, Darius, and the love of videogames, represented by Dom (Cedric Joe). Following Dom attempting to interest his father in the videogame he is building, in a faltering attempt to bond with his distant father, the character he is creating glitches out, to Dom's disappointment, LeBron, now desperate to bond with his child, takes his son to the head office of Warner Bros. It's here, undeniably, that the problems with SJ2 begin, with Don Cheedle's Al-G Rhythm, an AI created to market and promote the new WB 3000 (a thinly veilled HBO Max, on which this film was released alongside the cinema).

Cue Don Cheadle Word of the Day: superficial. See, here's the problem. The villains of the original Space Jam were, fittingly enough, cartoons. Jordan was a sole human in a sea of toon, with Danny Devito heading up the villainous Mon-Stars, who appear briefly, in perhaps the single most viciously unnecessary cameo in a film whose denoument is nothing but cameos. The Mon Stars were well-designed, well-voiced goons, an enjoyable pack of foils for our heroes. So back to Al-G. Cheadle is a very good actor. Moreover, unlike several people we'll come on to mention in the future, Cheadle is a very good voice actor.

Yet, alongside LeBron and Joe, with whom he shares almost all of his scenes, Cheadle, who plays, quite literally, an algorith who surfs the seas of trend with aplomb, Cheadle is strangely...ordinary. His performance, at least until the basketball game that roughly bisects the film in two, is oddly mannered, and overly pleasant, but for the flare of almost cartoonish, Bond-esque villainy, and by the time he amasses spectators for the showdown via LeBron's social media (no, seriously) the turn from ambicably evil pragmatist to out-and-out villain is too abrupt, too overblown, and too late. There, in blunt honesty, is so little to Al-G as a character; the fact he gets his own overly cutesified sidekick, the fact that his plan, visual presentation, and own ambition is so narrow, that he barely feels like a threat is just poor screenwriting. We'll get to this utter lack of ambition later, but for now...

We get the boardroom setpiece, Al-G sets himself, and by extension WB3000, up as the perfect foil for LeBron, briefly adding him to moments far more amusing and outlandish than anything the actual film could cook up. LeBron is not impressed, we get a bunch of cringeworthy dialogue from the rest of the board, and despite the protestations of Don, and his attempts to convince his father that his path lies with gaming, the two once again argue. The two quickly find themselves in the clutches of Al-G, we get a bit of back and forth badinage between Al-G and LeBron, the film sets up its basketball match for the fate of Don for the largest captive audience ever, bringing Al-G fame and fortune.

LeBron, now on the hunt for the team, is sent to the rejects, and the true abyssal, existential horror of Space Jam: A New Legacy becomes known, as the camera plummets past worlds themed after Game of Thrones, Casablanca, Harry Potter, Wizard of Oz, and the Matrix, before plummeting into Toon World, home of the Looney Tunes. All of these are, of course, accompanied with sonic, visual and cameo references so oblique one could identify each world the hapless b-baller plummets past with eyes closed. Yet, from this moment of utter, almost astonishingly basic pandering-one cannot help but hear the excited voices of teens pipe up as a beloved favourite whizzes by, or frame-by-frame analysis by bespotted YouTube commentators-we arrive at the best part of the film.

Behold.

Cartoon LeBron in a cartoon world, inhabited by cartoons. And what follows, when one strips back the Big Chungi, the obligatory Nike tick, the references to Kevin Hart, and LeBron's career, is a solid three or four minute Looney Tunes short in which Bugs Bunny references some of his best moments as he tries to kill the most famous professional athlete in the world, a joke that LeBron is fully in on as the two riff off each other. Sadly, a) the plot calls and b) we need to talk about voice acting. LeBron is front and centre of the posters as Jordan was, but elsewhere, an unfortunate truth raises its head. The characters are, of course, named, but the voice actors who bring most of them to life, with the exception of Zendaya, who voices Lola Bunny, are nowhere to be seen. Not even Mexican American icon, Gabriel Iglesias, who voices Speedy Gonzales, is credited in visible font on the posters, let alone Jeff Bergman (ahem; Bugs and Sylvester) and Eric Bauza (uh, everyone else aside from Tweety, Taz, Granny and The Roadrunner).

It's disappointing, for a film essentially powered by this group of voice actors, some of whom have been playing these roles for decades, to still remain uncredited on this big of a stage for the Looney Tunes, and one hopes that this will soon change. Back to the adventure. With the duo of Bugs and LeBron now having to get off world, Marvin the Martian is then punk'd, the duo make it off world in his spaceship, and, following a brief interlude with Al-G and Don in which the two engage in Steve Jobs-themed plot development, LeBron and Bugs find themselves at cross purposes, LeBron's dream-team and Bugs' attempt to reform his family.

And thus, as the duo arrive in Metropolis/DC World. the true horror of Space Jam: A New Legacy begins. WIth uh, a respectable recreation of the Superman Animated Series' visual style (and, for some reason, the 1960s Batman), as the duo of Porky Pig and Daffy Duck are picked up. So far, so...surprisingly good. And it's Draft Da-

And then the yawning void of $8 billion dollars of intellectual property mobilised for a single purpose opens. To make Space Jam: A New Legacy the greatest orgy of intellectual property ever. Bugs' eyes, his bucktoothed mouth, opens wide, an impossibly large space. Thousands of miles across. Two dollar signs, the length of Rhode Island, appear in the disembodied floating head of Bugs Bunny. A roll of thunder. No. The ker-ching of a distant, horrible, endless till. Welcome to the end of culture itself.

 

And all hell breaks loose. In less than a minute-gods, it feels so much longer, the film blasts through the opening moments of the War-rig v Immortan Joe chase from Mad Max Fury Road, the Roadrunner and Wile. E. Coyote haphazardly added over the top, a bizarre spectacle of an R-Rated action movie painted over, like the Chapmans to Goya, with the ultimate childhood icons. Wile E, of course, has joined a vehicular-based toxic masculinity death cult, he is "Witness"'d and, missing Roadrunner completely, lands on the front of Bugs and LeBron's car, and the duo quip as stock footage from perhaps the 21st Century's greatest action movie plays in the background. Both arrive on-ship, and this out-of-body experience has lasted only 33 seconds. And the madness has only just begun. We transition to Austin Powers, another R-Rated film, for what's basically another throwaway gag in which Mini-Me is replaced by Elmer Fudd, and Dr Evil's Siamese Cat by Sylvester.

It's at once incredibly disconcerting and incredibly lazy, the, at least grudging ingenuity of costume, film grain and chroma key matching between the new footage and Mad Max giving way to what is basically glorified doodling over existing footage. These are, by the way, just the first in a colossal list of IPs utterly unsuitable for children, that the film proceeds to reference from here on out, including, but not limited to Game of Thrones, The Matrix, A Clockwork Orange, It, The Exorcist, Joker, and perhaps, most alarmingly and certainly most bizzarely, Ken Russell's 1971's The Devils (no, seriously), a film that has been banned in several countries, and that, despite the work of critic Mark Kermode WB to this day refuse to release uncut on home media. It raises the question, and one that we will return to shortly of..."Who is this for"?

But stranger is to come. For, to the familiar strains of As Time Goes By, the film pulls the mother of all bizarrity, as we enter Rick's Cafe, as footage from Casablanca, a film that practically all of its audience can only have ever seen in second-hand references like this, is overlaid delicately with Yosemite Sam. It's...frankly a moment I wish the film had more of; a care for the original, a well timed joke, and careful matching of the LeBron and Bugs footage to the original film. It's...strange to say it, but at least two of the one-two-three punch of this sequence have landed decently. I am actually enjoying this film. Back to the ship as Taz is dropped of-



Wait a fucking second.
That's Justin Roiland. That's Rick and Morty. In a kids film. What. The. Fuck.

No.

Get this out of the film. What the hell, WB.

Gimme a second. Coffee break.

Ok, we're good. Where were we? Rick and...oh, just for the love of god, keep going...

This is followed by Foghorn Leghorn in Game of Thrones. As Daenarys. I.

I regret ever watching this film.

...No. No I am now not enjoying this film, and up next is the laziest, most by-the-numbers Matrix parody period. At least Lola's introduction is in comic-book style, and neatly plays with a few visual tropes of the medium, and her redesign, does, by the by, pleasingly annoy those who find the design of cartoon bunnies changing abhorent destruction of their childhood (for everyone else who finds her attractive, eh, your call, doc). She's also really the foil to LeBron sporting wise, her background in basketball (heck, she was created for Space Jam), giving her most of her personality. Fortunately, at this point, we cut back to Don and Al-G, as they begin to build their team, from the scans of NBA superstars and other elements he's scanned in, into a team of fearsome monsters, voiced and mocapped by those players they're based upon.

Back to the toons, as Lola and LeBron try to teach them the fundamentals of the game, to, uh, mixed results, the Looney-sense of the team rubbing up against the attempts by LeBron to keep the rest of the group on track leading to some nice visuals that seem undermined by the ubiquitous sports montage music. Back to Dom and Al-G, as the slow unmasking of Al-G from pseudo-father figure to faintly sinister figure, the voice taking on a distorted quality at lower pitches, as the film attempts to tie together the sense of Al being just as bad, just as domineering and monomanaical as the father he seeks to replace. Arriving back on Toonworld, the team soon find themselves confronted by Al-G, who upgrades them, semi-horrifyingly, into 3D CGI characters.

It's...jarring. It's a perfect metaphor for CGI's dominance over traditional animation. And here come the cameos. All fifteen second, blink-and-you'll miss-it. With a captive audience of fictional characters and now humans from the real world, including commentators that I'm sure I'd recognise if I was more into basketball. And, as we round the halfway mark...it's time for a basketball game. That somehow lasts longer than an actual basketball game. We're introduced to the Goon Squad, and LeBron attempts to win over his son, to no avail. Cue some basketball. Lots. And lots. Of basketball, with LeBron slowly slowly learning, over the half, that his form of basketball is simply not going to work in the world of videogame logic, power ups, and, well, Looney Tunes.

This finally comes to bear in half=time, with him realising, past the film's funniest moment in a moment of highly amusing mistaken identity, that like his son, he has been forcing the team to do things his way. Cue enjoyable chaos as the toons play to their strengths, from the inevitable tunnel gag to...Porky...Pig...rapping. Ahuh. With the Tunes now picking up courage, and Al-G's plans slowly coming apart, with the Goons losing one of their players, they finally take the lead, and Al-G himself begins to come apart, the villainous streak becoming more and more obvious. Following a heart to heart with Dom, in which LeBron admits his failings as a father to his son, and that he should follow his own path, so the duo reunite, as Al transforms into a towering figure to enter the game, using his control over the game to deny the Tunes more points. What follows, in a smart move, is a call-back to the glitch that destroyed Dom's original game, and a masterful callback to the final basket of the original Space Jam.

Except, what one is left with with Space Jam: A New Legacy is a sense, above all else, of anti-climax. Yes. You read that right. Anticlimax. If we must live in an age of cultural regurgitation in mainstream teen cinema, of the age of the mashup, the cinematic universe, so be it. Hell, The Lego Movie and The Lego Batman Movie did it well, even if the alternative is bottom feeder dreck like Ralph Breaks the Internet, The Emoji Movie, Scoob! and the so-so Ready Player One. If WB's hell is empty, one expects all its devils here, not milling around the sidelines as mere onlookers. A New Legacy manages what it could have been for barely ninety seconds, no more, ninety seconds of pure, unadulterated gleeful looneyness. It could have been so much more. An epic quest with The Lord of the Rings, a hunt for replicant Toons in the world of Blade Runner, even a hunt to track down either Kong or Godzilla, or journey to the foggy streets of Gotham, A New Legacy at once seems keen to show off its IP warchest, and yet relucant to actually use it in the way the original did. A whistlestop tour to tease this, nothing more.

It's...disappointing. I find myself surprised that I am disappointed by the lack of ambition in a film that seems the end product, the horrifying denoument of the very nature of the disposability of culture. I find myself equally surprised that I wanted more. I don't want to see a five of Don Cheadle and whichever four players LeBron rang first. I want a five of Godzilla, Lord Humungus, the Moutain, Agent Smith and a goddamn Nazgul. I want this film to have an entire five of various versions of the goddamn Joker. I want WB to clear the benches of their colossal gallery of rogues, villains, and antiheroes. Hell, in brutal terms, I want a goddamn battle, head to head, between the old God of basketball, and the crowned King. It'll never happen. It was never meant to happen. I want, in a word, Space Jam: A New Legacy to be something more than the twenty-plus afterthought of a glorified marketing campaign spinning off from a marketing campaign for a pair of trainers.

On the other hand, A New Legacy is horrifying, conceptually, the byproduct of a Hollywood at once producing ever more homogenised films whilst simultenously running out of ideas. It's the Funko-Popisation, the commodification of nearly a hundred years of cinema into a single, easily digestable, blank plastic parody of itself. I genuinely cannot recommend it for human consumption, even if it becoems the centre of highly amusing group roasts once COVID-19 allows it.  It is the worst film of the century, its most abhorent, its most conceptually disturbing, a blank void of self-celebratory nostalgia, a studio spilling its guts for a fast buck that, if box office receipts are to be believed, it won't even earn back. And at the centre of it stands, hanging forever over LeBron James, the sole human at the centre of this horrifying mechanical process, as he shoots three pointers, a shadowy figure of a basketball player, and a bunny.

LeBron James is many things, and like Jordan before him, has stepped far outside the reaches of the court as a statesman, an athlete and a man. But, as that duo of shadows retreats across the court, the murmur of basketball talk and wisecracks and carrot munching going with it, this strange vision of LeBron is left with the disconcerting thought that, even if he equals or surpasses Jordan's six NBA championships, even if he becomes the greatest basketball player of all time, a little part of him realises, deep down, he'll never be the star of the good Space Jam movie. He shrugs, and goes back to shooting three pointers.

And somewhere down the corridor, Bugs turns to Jordan, grins, and mutters:
"Ain't we a stinker?"

Rating: Avoid At All Costs.

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