I have never liked basketball. It’s a boring sport of which you only ever have to watch the last couple minutes because the score is always tied up until the very end. Sure, it’s fun to play, but I find it miserable to have to watch it. And sadly, I have always sort of felt the same way about the Looney Tunes. I’ve always had a hard time being entertained by the old cartoons, although as of late I am starting to gain a better appreciation of them. So what if you were to take these two things that I’m not fond of and put them together in a movie? Do you think that’s something I would enjoy? Well… Yeah, sort of, actually.
After some pint-sized aliens threaten to take Bugs Bunny and the rest of the Looney Tunes gang to be attractions at a theme park, the toons decide to challenge them to a basketball game. But the mini E.T.’s steal the talents of Charles Barkley, Patrick Ewing and a number of other famous players, turning them into monstrous basketball demons. It’s up to Michael Jordan to come in and help the toons save their furred and feathered skins from an eternity of slavery. Yes, this movie actually exists.
This movie is based on a very popular ad campaign from the mid-90s featuring Michael Jordan and Bugs Bunny selling Nike shoes, and it feels just as gimmicky as you would expect. The plot is absolutely ridiculous and exists solely as an excuse to somehow stretch an hour and a half out of a thirty-second ad. What’s worse is that their main marketing ploys, the Looney Tunes, are not funny in this movie. In fact, not only do they get all of the worst jokes in the movie, but the script focuses more on Michael Jordan and his career than anything else. Even moreso, there actually are a several genuinely funny gags throughout the film, but all of them come from the live-action stars. Basically what I’m saying is that the Looney Tunes characters, while seemingly being the only reason this movie was made, are cast aside in favor of promoting (or selling via) basketball, and it ultimately ends up alienating every kind of audience they might have hoped for.
Still, the movie was a pretty big success in its time, and I have to say that I can’t really complain. The movie itself is not good. As I said, most of the jokes just don’t work, but the effect of the animated characters with the live-action characters and settings is even worse. Remember in Who Framed Roger Rabbit how the cartoons really felt like they were mixed in with the human world? The characters here are so overly shadowed and under-designed that they never feel like they’re even real. It’s kind of hard to explain, but they never look like they’re actually walking around in their settings, and it doesn’t help that the people who have to interact with them are terrible actors.
But ultimately that is sort of the charm of the movie: The fact that the actors aren’t actors, they’re just people having fun. And this movie can be fun at times. I really wish it had taken itself a little bit more seriously and maybe had a better budget or team for its animation, but there’s just something there that I can’t quite explain that makes all the bad things work in the end. I really think it’s just that Michael Jordan is a likable person and he’s obviously having a lot of fun making this movie. Sure, he’s a bad actor, but he’s not trying to be good.
Space Jam is a movie that I cannot recommend to a lot of people. If you were going to see this movie, then you already saw it. It’s a product of a specific generation and the only people who are going to have any sort of appreciation for it are the people who grew up in that time. If I were reviewing this back when it came out, I would more than likely tell you to skip it and bring your kids to something that doesn’t suck.
Final Verdict: 