Posted by Forgotten cartoon characters take part in a basketball game to save Lebron James from the internet in this overlong Warner Bros advert
Wow it’s hot here at the moment. I don’t want to complain about the sun – we see so little of it in the UK, and I’d much rather have this heatwave than grey skies and constant rain. That being said, I had the need to cool down in recent days. Now that I work from home, it’s hard to escape heat with the air conditioning of an office. So, I decided to go to the cinema to cool down. Genius, eh? The drawback of going to the cinema so regularly though is I had seen most of the movies that were being shown, therefore I decided to watch the sequel to Space Jam. What’s the worst that could happen?
Lebron James and his son get sucked into the Warner Bros “server-verse” after offending a computer algorithm. The only way out is to beat the algorithm in a game of enhanced basketball. Simple for a professional basketball player, right? Issue is the only team Lebron is able to put together is the team of forgotten Looney Tunes characters. On top of this, Lebron’s son doesn’t share his dad’s passion for basketball and so gets manipulated into joining the Algorithm’s team. All sounding very Hook.
I have to say, the movie looks pretty nice. The character CGI is definitely an upgrade on what came before. Just looking at the texture of Bugs Bunny’s fur you can see the difference. Also, Don Cheadle as Al-G Rhythm seems to be having fun, I’m happy for him.
And that’s pretty much all the positives I can think of in this movie.
This entire movie is just overstuffed with Warner Bros showcasing their various IPs. So much so, the actual Looney Tunes characters are pretty much pushed to the background. At first it was interesting trying to recognise all the WB characters that were showing up, but then I realised I was no longer paying attention to the movie. Which probably did me a favour to be honest. This isn’t the first time Warner Bros have used their IP to drive a movie, we’ve seen it before with the Lego movies and also in live action with Ready Player One. Both of these handled it much better than Space Jam: A New Legacy.
The story itself wasn’t anything ground-breaking. We all knew which way it was going to go and how it was going to end. But it seemed to take a long time to get there. Given this is a movie aimed at children I don’t know how it aims to keep the attention of their target audience for 2 whole hours.
I was in a screening with just one other family present, a father and mother with their little child. They walked out at the halfway point. To be fair they could have just realised their kid’s attention span wouldn’t last the entire length of the movie. But it did make me feel a little lonely having to sit through this shitshow on my own.
Finally, a note on the jokes. They were pretty dire and unfunny. Once again, I understand this movie is aimed at younger kids, as opposed to older kids like me, but we’ve seen countless kid’s movies appealing to adults as well as children. Just think back to pretty much anything Pixar produces. With so much meta humour available in the form of the Looney Tunes, this was definitely an opportunity missed.
Verdict
Decent animation can’t save this movie. The jokes aren’t funny, the story has been overdone, the movie is far too long, and essentially, it’s just an advert for Warner Bros’ assets. Save yourself and give this one a miss – even it’s just to take advantage of the cinema air conditioning.
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