Les Looney Tunes passent à l'action

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

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.

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 bow to no one in my love and admiration for those classic Warner Brothers cartoons of the 1940's and 1950's. Like so many of my generation, I was virtually raised on these works from infancy on up. Yet, for those of us who are die-hard aficionados, 'Looney Tunes: Back in Action' is a decidedly depressing experience, proving, once again, that when it comes to revisiting one's childhood, a person truly can't go home again.

This is not, of course, a re-visitation in its purest form, since 'Back in Action,' like 1996's 'Space Jam,' is actually a modernized hybrid combining live action with animation. And that, perhaps, is the single greatest problem with this film. Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Elmer Fudd, the Road Runner and the rest of the gang clearly feel more at home in their own two-dimensional world in which the laws of nature have no jurisdiction. Yank them out of that context and stick them into the 'real world' with a bunch of overacting humans and their unique charm begins to drain away and dissipate. Unfortunately, both the cartoon characters and the humans with whom they are interacting are stuck with a dreary, largely unfunny script that substitutes pandemonium and movement for cleverness and wit (qualities the original cartoons had in abundance). The spy tale writer Larry Doyle has come up with is stultifying in its stupidity and reminds us of just why the Warner Brother originals, which were masterpieces of minimalist storytelling, ran for ten or fifteen minutes and no longer. Expanding the story to almost ten times that length stretches the already flimsy material far past the breaking point.

There are a few moments of inspired fun, such as when Bugs and Daffy, followed by an irate Elmer Fudd, jump in and out of art masterpieces in the Louvre, wreaking havoc as they go, or when our intrepid band of heroes encounters a secret Area 51-type government project in the desert inhabited by a coterie of creatures from 1950's 'B' movie classics. In fact, the movie has quite a bit of fun with 'in' movie references that adults are far more likely to get than the children who clearly make up the bulk of this movie's audience. But those moments of inspiration are few and far between, and most of the time we are stuck in a fairly dismal comedy overall. The blending of live action and animation, under the guidance of director Joe Dante, is pretty much state-of-the-art, though these particular cartoon characters have more charm when they are two, rather than three, dimensional in form.

Brendan Fraser, as a stunt man who goes in search of his kidnapped father with Bugs and Daffy along for the ride, makes an appealing hero, although the usually likable Jenna Elfman succeeds mainly in being annoying. Timothy Dalton has a nothing part as Fraser's dad, a legendary movie actor who turns out to be a spy off screen as well as on. Heather Locklear, Joan Cusack, Roger Corman, and Kevin McCarthy also make brief appearances, but the single worst job of acting is turned in by an overwrought and over-wound Steve Martin, who as the diabolical head of the Acme Corporation, delivers a ham handed performance of monumental badness.

Lovers of The WB cartoons had best stick with the originals.