SPACE JAM
A film review by Craig Good
Copyright 1996 Craig Good
Here I was, all pumped up in my best Gomez Addams "Let's watch a train wreck" mood, and all "Space Jam" could deliver was a fender bender. No, it couldn't deliver the kind of down-in-flames badfilm experience of a "Star Trek V", "Hudson Hawk" or "1941". Instead it's just a humorless, overdesigned and underscripted bowl of soggy Wheaties, breakfast of champions. Imagine a movie in which Bill Murray isn't funny.
Well, that's not quite true. Bill did get me to laugh once with his line right after Michael Jordan gets sucked down a golf hole. But by the end of the movie I couldn't remember the line anymore.
I'm not going to blame Jordan for being a bad actor. As an actor I'm no better, and if someone dangles that kind of pay check in front of me I'll do "Space Jam II". Besides, even though pro athletes are professional entertainers, we wouldn't be too hard on Placido Domingo or even Kenny G. if it turned out they couldn't play basketball in the NBA. And asking Jordan to carry a movie is every bit as absurd. No, Michael walks away from this pretty unscathed.
It's the Warner Bros studio which needs to hang its corporate head in shame. If there were laws in the world of art, what they did to their own legacy would be a felony. Someone really needs to send them a telegram and let them know that Mel Blanc is dead. None of the voices, except Tweedy and a couple of mice, came anywhere within the ballpark of the old classics. Worse, none of the animation can hold a candle to them.
The character design of the new characters is so unreadable and indistinct that it makes Don Bluth's work look like the Renaissance. The style of the staging is straight TV generation garbage: Extreme angles and manic movement with absolutely no sense of character. Not once did I think that any of the animated characters was thinking. Rather, they were yanked around by a vacuous script which could only have been written by a committee of ten year olds. At several points in the show we glimpse clips of the old Warner Brothers shorts. I had the same reaction to them as to the baker's dozen of "homages" in ID4: "Are you *sure* you want to be reminding me of what a *good* movie is like right now?"
Not only did they not understand their own short films, but in their headlong rush to throw money on the screen they lost the whole conceit of their "Who Framed Roger Rabbit" -- uh -- homage. When we get into Loony Tune Land or whatever the heck it was called, Bugs and the gang are running around with fancy pseudo-3D tone mattes on them. Shouldn't they only look like that in the "3D woild" as Bugs calls it? Oh, well. This is just the tip of a frustrating iceberg which waits anybody who sets sail in a sea of thought anywhere near this movie.
And speaking of money, where *did* it go? I know that animation is expensive, but for half the price of the rumored budget of $140 million they could have done some good computer graphics instead of those inflated balloon guy effects which can surely be done by teenagers on home computers these days.
So if you were hoping for either a good movie or one that was so bad it was good, save your money and see "The English Patient" or rent "Star Trek V", respectively.
--Craig
good@pixar.com
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