Looney Tunes: Back in Action

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).

Even though I had heard good things about this film, I didn't expect that much....but was very surprised. It's good, very entertaining and worth watching. The humor is excellent with some very funny things in here and very clever in spots. It helps a lot to know your Looney Tunes characters and it helps a great deal to know your film history. References to old films and characters are everywhere. For that reason, I would recommend this film for classic movie fans. They'll be pleasantly surprised.

On the bad side, I found the film too loud, which is no surprise since cartoons tend to be that way. The loudest may have been Daffy Duck, who is a major player in this film. The female lead, Jenna Elman, is too hard-looking and just not likable to me.

The positives outweigh the negatives, however. If you can put up with the loudness and stupid acting (Steve Martin is brutal here in that regard), you'll still get a ton of laughs out of this movie.

I really like Jenna Elfman (Kate) as a comedienne. She generally does pretty well. She started off great in Looney Tunes searching for Daffy Duck to get him back to the studio, because her job depended on it. But then the plot morphs into Brendan Fraser (Drake) looking for his father and Elfman becomes simply a spectator in the second half of the movie. She becomes a prop on the set, rather than a character having something to do with the action.

After her trip to Las Vegas in the film, Kate serves pretty much as a prop rather than as a character. She does throw a monkey wrench and puts a piece into a puzzle. But after the trip to Las Vegas, Ms. Elfman is mostly just a prop on the set. When the camera goes to her, she is simply standing there watching at Brendan Fraser (Drake) do his part. Fraser does pretty well. He does act through out, but in the second half of the film Elfman is simply a prop.

I went to see this film as a fan of Ms. Elfman's. I heard Ms. Elfman on TV state that she wanted to do more films with Fraser. That will probably be a good thing. I know she can act as I have seen her in other films doing a great job. I think Elfman & Fraser will make a good pair, but Elfman has got to do more acting and less spectating. The definition of "act" is "do", not "spectate" or "watch".

I give the first half a 7 and the second half a 3 for an average of 5. After the first half I was just hoping it would end.

An almost total mess, and no-one wanted to like it more than me.

The live action sequeces are flat emotionally, photographically, dramatically and every other way: Dante seems have done the impossible by making Brandon Frase, Jenna Elfman, Steve Martin and Joan Cusack plus various culty walkongs (Roger Corman, Mary Woronov) unfunny, unbelievable, and uninteresting.

The model, curiously, is not so much Who Killed Roger Rabbit as Rodriguez's Spy Kids movies -- but without the heart or the inspired originality and ingenuity. Instead, it's mindsplitting, unrelentingly meta, carpetbombing the audience with more movie quotes than Tarantino has in "Kill Bill." You say, "Sure, I remember that cartoon well, and it was a helluvalot better than this."

What the film needs -- particularly since it's gotta be pointed at least partially at kids -- is some kid characters, interesting ones. Instead, it just has lame Hollywood jokes, lame Las Vegas jokes, lame Paris jokes, and lame movie auteur jokes that had my seven year old son wondering when it was going to be funny. Sure, it was sometimes: if you go to the well that often, you'll find water somewhere.

The one exception to the general sloppy anarchy is a wonderful sequence with Bugs and Daffy chasing through the Louvre, into painting after painting after painting (most of them not at the Louvre, but so what). I'd love to have it on a loop, with the rest of the film surgically removed.

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.