The new Space Jam movie is bad. Like “what were they thinking?” bad. This isn’t shocking. This is a sequel to the 1996 film starring Michael Jordan, which was an 87-minute parade of Looney Tunes bits interspersed with lackluster basketball sequences and some severely wooden acting from His Airness. There’s a cynical, tossed-off quality to the first Space Jam. There is hardly any effort put forth toward telling anything like a story, but there is a commitment to make the Looney Tunes sequences authentic to the spirit of the show. Space Jam is a Looney Tunes film starring Michael Jordan. Space Jam: A New Legacy, the new film starring LeBron James, is a LeBron movie begrudgingly featuring the Looney Tunes.
There’s a grim reality to this movie that’s hard to face. Its villain is an anthropomorphized computer algorithm played by Don Cheadle and named Al-G Rhythm. Living inside the Warner Bros computer system (or something), Al-G is tired of creating fantastic ideas only to have the mortals of the living world take all the credit. Gone are the cryptic aliens of Moron Mountain, replaced by the digitized prisons of Al-G, who captures LeBron and his son Dom (Cedric Joe) in his labyrinthine world of zeroes and ones. They’re sucked into the world of Warner Bros IP, with planets for Harry Potter, Game of Thrones and even classic films like The Maltese Falcon and Casablanca. The most barren of these worlds is the one with the Looney Tunes, a sparse wasteland since Al-G sequestered them as “rejects”. It’s here where LeBron needs to put together his basketball team.
This setup allows A New Legacy to drop in on all of these different franchises. The dragons and white walkers from Game of Thrones arrive. King Kong storms in. Batman and Superman. The Flinstones and the Jetsons. The Droogs form A Clockwork Orange and Pennywise from It. There is so much, cast with such a wide net, that it’s hard to understand how the film benefits from it. It serves next to no narrative purpose, functioning mostly as background decoration to the big game (which is inside of a video game created by Dom, the fulcrum of a plot not really worth recounting). It seems mostly like a commercial for what studio movies are now and what they will continue to be. There are no storytellers in the top offices of Hollywood, just acquirers of assets, looking to hoard known brands. It’s pretty bleak stuff.
There’s still a centerpiece basketball game with the Tunes facing off against facsimiles of professional talent (Damian Lillard, Klay Thompson, Anthony Davis, as well as WNBA stars Diana Turasi and Nneka Ogwumike). A New Legacy manages to have even less fidelity to actual basketball than the first film, which is actually quite an achievement, though this new film borrows the same template (they’re down by an impossible amount at halftime, setting the stage for a historic comeback). In a twist, LeBron is also playing against Dom, who has been manipulated by Al-G into believing that his dad is not as supportive as he could be. The stakes get pretty high, with LeBron and his family getting trapped in Al-G’s virtual reality if he loses. LeBron also has to win back the respect of Dom. I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that the good guys win.
The first Space Jam, as haphazard as it was, pared down its story considerably to leave ample room for Bugs Bunny and the rest of the gang to flesh out their most beloved routines (not to mention choice comedic numbers from Wayne Knight and Bill Murray). A New Legacy doesn’t even do that. In fact, the Tunes’ usual manic energy is often dragged down by the film’s droll, sentimental plotline about “parenting”. This was ostensibly made for children (though it goes without saying that it will have a large draw among adult millennials), so berating it probably seems futile. And I do believe a small child today – more literate in the internet and technology than any youth group before them – would enjoy New Legacy‘s breach into the multi-pronged world of mass commerce. In fact, this movie seems to count on people being less discerning because it’s a Space Jam movie. So it goes. At least Don Cheadle seemed to be having a lot of fun.
Directed by Malcolm D. Lee