A Reel Review: SPACE JAM - A NEW LEGACY

In 1996, NBA superstar Michael Jordan starred in the live-action/animation hybrid SPACE JAM, which saw Jordan competing in a basketball game alongside Warner Bros. animation legends Bugs Bunny and his looney friends. Here in 2021, the hopeful heir-apparent to Jordan, LeBron James, follows in his large Nike footsteps for another game. 

 

LeBron James (starring as himself), and his son Dom (Cedric Joe), are zapped into the Warner Bros. computer servers by a rogue artificial intelligence called Al-G Rhythm (Don Cheadle). To escape, they must play a basketball game alongside the looney tunes characters. 

 

SPACE JAM: A NEW LEGACY loosely follows the plot of the first film, with LeBron having to recruit a team to win the game. The stakes are higher this time around courtesy of some family drama; young Dom doesn’t want to play basketball like his dad and would prefer to design video games. This is picked up on by Al-G Rhythm (major groan with that name), who seduces Dom to play for his squad. There is a sub-text at work here about parents not giving their kids time and space to grow into their own person. It’s meant to give the film some heart and depth, but director Malcolm D. Lee, along with his six (!) credited screenwriters, handle the family business with the dexterity of an Acme cannon; everything is heavy-handed and clumsy. 

 

To assemble his team, LeBron journeys through the Warner Bros. servers where he encounters nearly every character and property that WB has ever owned; including the world of HARRY POTTER, the DC Comics superheroes, TV’s GAME OF THRONES, and even the classic CASABLANCA. While it’s fun at first, this is (again), handled clumsily and the thousands of background characters are shoved down our eye-sockets over and over again. Classic characters show up a thousand times and nearly upstage the looney tunes guys and girls, and most of them are poor imitations looking like cheap Halloween costumes. 

 

The film is updated to catch the attention of today’s younger audiences, with the computer-generated basketball game a mess of headache-inducing graphics, loud noises, and insane camera movement. There is a lot on the screen at once and it’s hard to find something to focus on. The looney tunes characters look and sound fine, and their old gags still work well, although a few jokes such Granny going all MATRIX and Porky Pig doing a rap act are just eye-rollingly bad. Other issues: Actor's sight-lines don't seem to align with the virtual characters they are supposed to be looking at, and on top of everything else...the movie has nothing to do with "space". 

 

Acting is shit. LeBron James shouldn’t quit his day job. Don Cheadle seems to have been told to act like a cartoon. 

 

After all the noise and predictable outcome, A NEW LEGACY goes for an emotional ending which at first seems like a surprise (a major character dies), but then the movie just changes its mind for no real reason. Between the choppy writing, awful acting, and a migraine of a palette, A NEW LEGACY feels like it exists just to showcase LeBron and WB’s catalog of property. That’s all it is, folks. 

 

BOTTOM LINE: Fuck it