I enjoyed the Hook-like scenes of Cheadle bonding with a captive Dom James (Cedric Joe). It’s primarily concerned with lionizing LeBron James himself and touting the Warner Bros. Space Jam: A New Legacy isn’t anywhere near good enough to artistically justify its crassly commercial existence. It’s telling that while Al-G Rhythm is the villain, the algorithm that implicitly demands movies like this to exist is rendered innocent. It’s a mentality that’s upending the entire entertainment industry, even polluting the streaming platforms which are now making the same mistakes (IP-branded, four-quadrant, kid-friendly tentpoles above all else) that allowed TV and streaming to get a leg up on theatrical movies in the first place. Would I be less grouchy about this film if this were still 1996, when a movie like Space Jam was A) unique unto itself and B) surrounded by a wider variety of big-budget studio films like Ransom, The Crucible, Jerry Maguire and Scream? Quite possibly, as Space Jam: A New Legacy is now a classic example of “IP for the sake of IP,” a brand extension that exists not because audiences want it but because a studio (and/or the film’s star) wants it to continue. spent $150 million on a 25-years-later Space Jam sequel (the first barely cracked $250 million on a $90 million budget in 1996), but the money is often on the screen.
The stakes for the game are inexplicably high, another example of how now every big movie has to be about essentially saving a world, but I won’t pretend that the surface-level visuals aren’t occasionally glorious. characters, mostly villains, making up the audience in attendance. Your mind may end up drifting from the game and finding solace playing Where’s Waldo with the countless Warner Bros. While I liked that James and friends are forced to compete in a version of his son’s video game, it also renders much of the gameplay entirely arbitrary and lacking in the kind of almost logical Rube Goldberg-ish humor that makes the actual Merry Melodies such a kick. Otherwise, the toons are essentially the toons, even if the Animaniacs are inexplicably confined to background attendees at the big game.
Fans of the 2011 Looney Tunes episodic know that Lola (voiced there by Kristen Wiig) can be both non-sexualized and ghoulishly funny. She’s “strong” and “skilled,” but she’s also not allowed to cut loose. Moreover, this version of Lola is painfully boring and barely allowed to crack a joke.
“Fixing” her implies that bad male behavior was Lola’s fault (see also: Walt Disney “fixing” Belle in the live-action Beauty and the Beast remake). Yes, she’s less sexualized in this film, but the issue with the first Space Jam was not Lola but rather how all of the other male characters treated her (in terms of viewing her entirely as a sex object). The animated co-stars provide the expected slapstick comedy.
0 kommentar(er)
