Space Jam was not a good movie. Before diving into its’ horrible horrible sequel, I feel like that has to be reiterated.The 1996 hour and a half commercial about Michael Jordan teaming up with the Looney Tunes for a basketball game against aliens stuck around in the nostalgia of a lot of folks my age because it was frankly too weird not to. But it was a shameless corporate product, excessively cynical in both design and execution, blatantly pandering, and it willfully misunderstood both the popularity of Michael Jordan and especially of the Looney Tunes -who are unrecognizable to anyone who loved their cartoons. I want to emphasize this to show that the mere existence of Space Jam: A New Legacy is not an affront to any unimpeachable classic. The original was bad, and its’ sequel is even worse. Though Space Jam: A New Legacy might also be the best thing to happen to the original in the twenty-five years since -because it manages to make that film actually look appealing by comparison.
I think I can honestly say that Space Jam: A New Legacy is one of the most repulsive films I’ve seen. It takes the commercial sensibilities of the original film, largely a propaganda work for Jordan and his associated sponsorships at a relatively low point in his career, and dials them up to eleven. Barely a minute goes by without some kind of product placement either small or large-scale. And it would be one thing if these were just blatant advertisements for HBO Max or certain Warner Bros. films, but it goes deeper. This movie is an all-out celebration of how much I.P. Warner Bros. owns. We’re meant to be awed by and bask in their exorbitant wealth of content (as well as just their exorbitant wealth itself). And some will be, those who are easily impressed by references, who think it’s cool to see Batman inhabit the same screen as Fred Flintstone and Voldemort and Mad Max and the Gremlins. I found it utterly nauseating.
It follows the exact same structure as its’ predecessor albeit with a new plot centring on the relationship between LeBron James (this films’ replacement for Michael Jordan and in its’ one advantage over the original, a better actor) and his son Dom (Cedric Joe). Dom is a gifted video game designer whom his father can’t connect with because he has an interest in something that is not basketball. A tedious and impressively lazy story trope that the film makes no attempts to render interesting. It isn’t long though before the shameless self-promotion by Warner Bros. kicks in, LeBron and Dom visiting the Burbank studio about a ridiculous movie deal which would involve LeBron being inserted into Warners’ various franchises. An establishing shot of the studio makes clear to emphasize an array of giant movie posters of various recent Warners releases you’d otherwise have completely forgotten about, from Scoob! to Tom & Jerry (I’m pretty sure the Snyder Cut was visible at one point too) and in a montage of I.P. the execs (depressingly played by Steven Yeun and Sarah Silverman) are showing LeBron, Space Jam is the first one. There wasn’t much subtlety to the earlier film either (everyone remembers that bit where Wayne Knight spouts off some six product placements in the span of thirty seconds), but these are the first big signs that Warner Bros. is withholding any and all transparency about what the purpose of this movie actually is. And they are openly taking delight in how many people are buying into it without question.
Don Cheadle is behind the attempted deal, playing an evil A.I. algorithm (literally named Al-G Rhythm because this movie despises its’ audience) who controls the Warner Bros’ “Server-Verse” -a career choice that just about shoots dead the goodwill I had of him after No Sudden Move. The Server-Verse is the home to every media property Warner Bros. owns, represented by planets bathed in the appropriate iconography. Upset that LeBron doesn’t like his idea but finding that Dom does, Al-G separates the two by kidnapping the latter (and asserting himself as an alternative father-figure) and condemning LeBron to the Looney Tunes planet, but not before challenging him to a basketball game over Dom’s freedom.
Entering the film at over a half hour into its’ runtime, the Looney Tunes resemble their traditional archetypes even less than in the original Space Jam. In fact they and their world are written in a way that implies only the vaguest and most basic memories of the Looney Tune legacy. Every character utters their most famous line or references their most famous routine (excepting for an absent Pepe Le Pew -lucky him). And Bugs Bunny (voiced by Jeff Bergman) is the only one afforded substantive plotting -he has a shadow of an arc in his insistence on recruiting the other Looney Tunes as a way of reuniting them all (they abandoned the Looney Tune world for other media properties some time ago). But after this is successful he and the other characters become mostly wall-dressing, barring an occasional bout of slapstick. Daffy Duck (voiced by Eric Bauza) is criminally underutilized, as is even Lola Bunny (Zendaya of all people), added to the cast of the original Space Jam as an object of fetish, here less sexualized but no more interesting.
Space Jam: A New Legacy doesn’t care about the Looney Tunes -in fact there’s an accidental metaphor in Al-G threatening to delete them if they lose for how Warner Bros. treats its’ older properties. They’re not even in the top ten of what Warners is trying to sell through this movie and you know that they’d have been replaced by another franchise cast if not for obligation. In time for the big game they are all transformed from their relatively inoffensive cel-animation designs into 3D creatures that are utterly hideous. The fact that the movie is on some level aware of this, lampshading it as they do the recycled premise, doesn’t make it any less awful. Al-G and Dom’s team, consisting as in the last movie of mutant versions of other well-known basketball players, look bad too (and weirdly cheap), but not to as abhorrent a degree.
I have to guess that the reason the basketball game lasts so long in this movie is so Warner Bros. can increase the screen-time for their endless cameos. Prior to this were a series of bits where Looney Tunes were plucked out of footage from other movies: Mad Max: Fury Road, The Matrix, Austin Powers, even Casablanca -which broke my heart -all of them the highest definition of what they call "cringe". It was but a teaser though for the onslaught of recognizable properties that fill out the audience for the basketball game, never failing to distract (and by design) from the actual game. It is utterly bizarre too which icons receive prominence. Certainly the Mask, the White Walkers from Game of Thrones, the Iron Giant, and various movie-specific Batman characters are given repeated front-focus, but occupying the court-side also are Baby Jane, the Droogs from A Clockwork Orange, and the nuns from Ken Russell’s The Devils -a film that Warners has never released in its’ uncensored form. If these are appeals to movie buffs, I can’t imagine any of my bretheren enjoying them. Certainly these and the aforementioned clips wouldn’t appeal to the films’ supposed target audience of kids either, who in all likelihood haven’t heard of let alone seen these movies. It applies just as much to other bizarre cultural references: I never would have expected an MC Hammer joke in 2021, and continuing on the thread of 90s popular music, there’s an actual scene where Porky Pig performs a rap in an impression of Biggie that screams bad taste.
The truth of it is that this movie is aimed at people my age, weaponizing nostalgia as is so common these days in a flagrant and proud display of unchecked capitalism -because they know their audience isn’t going to challenge it, mistaking acknowledgement of other media entities for exciting artistic choices. It didn’t begin here of course, it goes back to Ready Player One and Ralph Breaks the Internet, perhaps starting with The Lego Movie and its’ collection of cameos from various name media properties under that same Warner Bros. belt. Space Jam: A New Legacy though is truly the apotheosis of nostalgia reference culture and naked corporate greed in the movies.
One could make the argument though that the villainous Al-G Rhythm is an embodiment of Warner Bros. themselves, masking an obsession with adding LeBron to his collection of I.P.’s with slick con artist charm and humour; and that this would make the messaging of the movie in fact distinctly anti-corporate monopoly. It’s a valid reading of the text, but film is more than just text, and the aesthetic subtext and coding of this film says the exact opposite. It doesn’t matter that this facsimile of the studio is portrayed as the bad guy, the mock-up references are composed in a way so as to entice your nostalgia, validate your familiarity with dozens of Warner Bros. properties. The Server-Verse is designed to emphasize a kind of wondrous scale, and you’re encouraged to look for your favourite characters in the crowd scenes. It gets to suggest one value while insidiously expressing and actually amplifying another.
Even for a movie so odiously and openly careless, the last act is extremely half-assed. Two parallel sudden plot developments concerningBugs Bunny offer no explanation and the relationship issues between LeBron and Dom are resolved exactly as you expect. This is the point really -the story was never important, Space Jam: A New Legacy has six credited writers and shifted directors early on from the avant-garde Terence Nance to the more commercial Malcolm D. Lee. The movie is about selling the image and breadth of the Warner Bros. conglomerate more than anything else. And in a way, it does work. I’m more certain of Warner Bros. now than I’ve ever been before.
For a while now I’ve had a bit of a vocal hate-on for Disney and their frighteningly relentless empire of content dominating much of American pop culture, and have conveniently ignored Warner Bros. because they haven’t been as obnoxious or frankly successful. However with one stroke Space Jam: A New Legacy changed that and forced me to reconcile with just how bad this company is too. It may have a more diverse pool than Disney but it’s no less grossly monopolistic. And this movie was their masterpiece of self-aggrandizement. A loathsome spectacle.
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