Looney Tunes: Les revoilà!

Daffy Duck finally has enough of playing second fiddle to Bugs Bunny, he quits the Hollywood studio and teams up with Bobby Delmont (Brendan Fraser) an ex-stuntman; together they go on a mission to rescue Damian Drake (Timothy Dalton) a spy who has been captured by the evil chairman of the Acne corporation (Steve Martin)

With strong comic performances from Brendan Fraser, Steve Martin and Jenna Elfman, plus everyone's favourite Looney Tunes, this film is a good laugh for the whole family, and the blend between cartoon and real life is the best i have seen.

7/10

More than making up for the lame excuse for a film that was the

widely panned "Space Jam", this live-action/animation combination featuring Warner's cartoon characters perfectly

recaptures the classic Looney Tunes' wonderfully nonsensical,

freewheeling spirit. There isn't much in a way of an acceptable or

even decent plot, actually, but don't let that deter you since that's

precisely the reason why any attempt to fit the Looney Tunes gang

into a full-length film would flounder. Instead, director Joe Dante

and writer Larry Doyle erect a perilously teetering scaffold upon

which an insanely huge number of amazingly good sight gags and

verbal puns is set, while at the same time paying some sort of

warped tribute to classic sci-fi B-films of the fifties. The `plot' has

Daffy Duck fired from Warners by executive Jenna Elfman as

outdated, then proceeding to get security guard Brendan Fraser

fired along with him, and both embarking on a nutty drive to Las

Vegas to find the whereabouts of Fraser's dad, film star/spy

Timothy Dalton, eventually uncovering a dastardly conspiracy from

ACME chairman Steve Martin to use the Blue Monkey diamond to

enslave mankind. Of course it doesn't make sense, and that's fine

-- it's not meant to. You may point out that the live action/animation

combination doesn't always work, that the live actors never reach

the manic intensity of the cartoon characters (except for Joan

Cusack's wonderfully, ahem, daffy cameo), but really, that's beside

the point when the gratuitously violent and deliriously politically

incorrect free-for-all of the original cartoons is so perfectly

duplicated here.

This is one of my greatest guilty pleasures and none of you can take it away from me.

I'm a huge Looney Tunes fan, if not a major cartoon fanatic alone, so when I found out this movie was being made, I jumped for the chance to see it. First off, I was thrilled to see that the creators stuck to the "Roger Rabbit" technique, in which the cartoons were all hand-drawn and computers are only used to add color and depth (to give the 3D appearance of the characters). Second, I thought that the cartoons themselves were great. Bugs, Daffy, Porky, Yosemite Sam, Foghorn, Speedy Gonzales, Elmer... they all stuck to the same characteristics that I grew to love watching Bugs Bunny cartoons on Saturday morning. The only real draw-back of this movie was, without a doubt, the live-action actors. Brendan Fraser is good, but he can't live up to his past movies (especially "The Mummy" saga). The same goes to Jenna Elfman, who's talent is severly wasted as she comes across as the most serious character in the whole movie. Timothy Dalton, as usual, is flawless (and if you look closely, you can actually see how closely Fraser and Dalton look alike). Steve Martin, meanwhile, makes one of the worst performances of his career, and acts WAY too over the top, even for an eccentric villain.

The movie is good, but only is you are a truly devoted cartoon-lover (if you are, then you'll get a huge kick out of the opening sequence alone). Overall, come for Bugs, leave for Martin.

Forget "Roger Rabbit", but forget also "Space Jam". It is so sad when three great actors like Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck and Steve Martin blatantly "do it for the > money" (or the carrots, or whatever they pay Daffy with). All three of them do a really poor standard performance... The human villain thinks it's enough to act stupid to look like a cartoon, the two toons seem to justify wooden acting with pretending to be human. A recent Hollywood fashion is an attitude like "Hey, let's get something that worked in the past, cut some stupid expenses like a decent screenwriter, and let's be back in the big bucks again! Just put in some expensive-looking effects and the morons won't notice!" - Matrix 2.1 and 2.2 as a case in point. And the effects are marginally under standard, too. Bottom line, I definitely didn't like it; make it 5/10, and just thanks to the only true professional there: Vile E. Coyote, great as usual (and quoting himself, they pay him WAY too little).