SPACE JAM
A film review by Scott Renshaw
Copyright 1996 Scott Renshaw
(Warner Bros.) Starring: Michael Jordan, Wayne Knight, Bill Murray, voices of Danny DeVito, Billy West. Screenplay: Leo Benvenuti & Steve Rudnick and Timothy Harris & Herschel Weingrod. Producers: Ivan Reitman, Joe Medjuck, Daniel Goldberg. Director: Joe Pytka. MPAA Rating: PG (mild profanity, adult humor). Running Time: 85 minutes. Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.
Michael Jordan and Bugs Bunny share top billing in Warner Bros.' live action/animation extravaganza SPACE JAM, but I'm going to go out on a limb to suggest that it was made more for those who grew up with His Airness than for those who grew up with His Hareness. Jordan is a superstar in an era where the line between entertainment and marketing is more like a faint smudge, and SPACE JAM is a film which defines the state of the art in tie-ins: action figures, Happy Meals, clothing, soundtrack albums and on and on and on. That kind of emphasis on merchandising made it a long shot for artistic merit, but I hoped the Looney Tunes could make for some genuine lunacy. No such luck, Doc. SPACE JAM is a sporadically amusing cartoon for a rapid-edit audience with too little of the classic Warner wit.
The story involves an extraterrestrial entrepreneur named Swackhammer (voice of Danny DeVito), owner of an outer space amusement park called Moron Mountain which is in need of a new attraction. Swackhammer thinks earth's wacky Looney Tunes characters are just the thing, so he sends five diminutive henchmen to bring them back. Head Looney Tune Bugs Bunny (voice of Billy West) cleverly convinces the tiny aliens to play a basketball game for their freedom...at least he thinks it's clever until the aliens steal the talent of NBA players including Charles Barkley, Patrick Ewing and Larry Johnson and become the Monstars. In an attempt to even the odds, Bugs recruits Michael Jordan, currently in the middle of his basketball retirement and playing baseball for the minor league Birmingham Barons. Thus begins the Space Jam, with Michael lacing up the high-tops again to save his two-dimensional pals from intergalactic slavery.
Anyone who has seen Michael Jordan in any of his several thousand commercial appearances (McDonald's, Gatorade, Nike, Hanes) should not be surprised to hear that he has very little screen presence. Jordan has exactly one facial expression when trying to act -- eyebrows raised, lips pursed in a wrinkled smirk -- and he runs the gamut of emotions from affable bemusement to amiable bemusement. That makes it challenging enough for him to work with another human actor, weighing down an otherwise amusing scene where a star-struck catcher feeds Jordan information about what pitches to expect. When he is expected to react to animated characters, he is utterly lost. It isn't that much of the comedy involves interaction between Jordan and the 'Tunes; mostly he is asked to be pleasant and dunk in slow motion. There just seems to be no particular reason why Jordan couldn't have been animated himself, where an artist could have made him more...well, animated.
Of course, the animated segments have their own problems. Make no mistake, SPACE JAM is going to be entertaining to 10-year-olds, relying on the slapstick violence which has always characterized Looney Tunes. What's missing is the subversive, adult-oriented humor of the Looney Tunes of old, and not "adult-oriented" in the sense that it was crude. The classic Warners cartoon capers took the time to build both visual and verbal gags, but director Joe Pytka doesn't believe his audience will have that kind of patience. SPACE JAM's idea of sharp satire is a reference to the Disney-owned Mighty Ducks NHL franchise, and it is disspiriting to find the 'Tunes scraping for laughs by uttering lines like "Nice butt," or "We're getting screwed." It also seems strangely appropriate that Bugs Bunny is voiced by Billy West; with its bodily functions humor, SPACE JAM seems less like a vehicle for Bugs than one for West's other cartoon voice roles, Ren and Stimpy.
SPACE JAM only really comes to life when Bill Murray appears as himself. Murray's comic persona is the human descendent of Bugs Bunny, a wiseacre rebel unfairly smarter than his adversaries, and he is a riot in his scant minutes. He is also virtually the only reason for an adult to slog through SPACE JAM. For the kids, it provides well-known 'Tunes; for the teens, it provides well-known tunes (covers of "Fly Like an Eagle" by Seal and "Basketball Jones" by the truth-is-stranger-than-fiction pairing of Barry White and Chris Rock); for both, it provides perhaps the most well-known athlete on the planet. SPACE JAM is a commercial construct, and it feels like it. How sad that a brilliant comic creation like Bugs Bunny has to ride shotgun with a wooden basketball star, all to provide a set of collector's cups.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 err Jordans: 4.
Visit Scott Renshaw's MoviePage http://www-leland.stanford.edu/~srenshaw Subscribe to receive reviews directly via email See details on the MoviePage
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews