Delayed Reaction: Space Jam: A New Legacy

Premise: LeBron James is pulled into the WB server to play a basketball game for the fate of the Looney Toons and his family.

 

My feelings about the original Space Jam are complex. I was 9 in 1996 and a budding basketball fan. I loved the movie at the time and have seen the movie numerous times. My affection for the movie hasn't lasted into adulthood though. Space Jam isn't one of my movies. It isn't very good. And I don't mean that as "it's so bad it's good". I mean the jokes are weak. The story is forced. Michael Jordan's acting is truly terrible. But I do recognize that there are a few things this movie does right. The sound track is legit great. It turned out that Charles Barkley was pretty good on screen. Getting Bill Murray on board is an underrated win. Whether by luck or by leadership, the movie got a few things right.

 

I went into Space Jam: A New Legacy with fair expectations. I don't hold up the original movie as some kind of classic to be measured up to. I know that Lebron is a better actor than Jordan, but I realize that all the praise he received for being in Trainwreck included the "for a basketball player" qualifier. I was even ready for this to be a transparent brand plug for Warner Brothers.

 

Despite all my level-setting, I still ended up underwhelmed by A New Legacy. It has all the problems of the original without any of the strengths.

 

The Looney Tunes have even less cultural cache than they did in 1996. To get around that, the movie decides to lean more into jokes about the Tunes being in other WB properties. I suppose there's a logic to that, but I wasn't prepared for just how much this movie was Ready Player One with Lebron James. Did you know that Warner Brothers owns film rights for DC, The Matrix, and [sort of] Harry Potter? You do now. I think this wouldn't've bothered me as much had they not just done a movie a couple years ago about how much people love the Iron Giant and King Kong now. The fact that it's the same brand is what annoyed me. Had Space Jam been Paramount and featured Jurassic World, Mission: Impossible, and Nickelodeon brands, it would've felt fresher, but we just did this with WB properties. And it didn't even feel that thought out. Like, why is there a DC World and a Wonder Woman World? They named these things, not me.

 

Perhaps I'm weird, but my favorite parts of the original Space Jam were actually the live action parts. Bill Murray makes the golf scene great. The basketball players losing their powers is silly and fun. The "Basketball Jones" scene with Charles Barkley is self-awarely funny. A New Legacy doesn't use that time as well. It spends most of the live action time with Lebron's family who - how can I say this nicely - I don't care at all about. If I'm going to see bad acting, make it be basketball players trying to be funny or A-list comedians slumming it.  Yet, this movie barely has any of the actual basketball stars in it other than Lebron. As much as anything, I was looking forward to Diana Taurasi trying to land a punchline, Anthony Davis doing awkward physical comedy, and Klay Thompson talking about scaffolding. Instead, I get one quick scene in a gym and some animated characters.

 

As long as I'm doing a drive-by of attacks on this movie, the soundtrack sucks. I never appreciated how much the soundtrack made the first movie until now. There are no bangers in this movie. That, more than anything, will hurt the long-term prospects of this movie.

 

Space Jam: A New Legacy thinks that I signed up for family and WB iconography, when I actually signed up for basketball and Looney Tunes. The miscalculation is as simple as that. No amount of Don Cheadle (playing the evil WB algorithm) going nuts can fix that. I'm not one to complain about cynical cash grabs by a studio. I welcome our media conglomerate overlords. Some of the silliest stuff out there comes from a studio being lazy and a couple creative people sneaking in something subversive. So, I want to make it clear that I'm not coming from a "studios are creatively bankrupt" place when I disparage this movie. Space Jam: A New Legacy is loud yet somehow boring. It doesn't understand how it should be cynical. They tried so hard and ended up with something somehow worse than if they'd put in no effort at all. It's quite baffling.

 

Verdict: Strongly Don't Recommend