This unpleasant experience is akin to being thrown down the throat of a computer on crack.
“I’m not exactly sure what we quite witnessed here” says the game commentator in the film at one point, and his succinct confusion perfectly encapsulates the nature of this mess. I usually like to open with a useless parable that’s tenuously connected by a withering thread to the review proper, but this occasion is different. This ignominious film has sparked a raging ire in me which I just cannot put off any longer to extinguish. Woah! Let’s not get too hyperbolic here, it’s just a film after all, if you could even call it that.
I was having a rather terrible day; a week-long heat wave had turned the atmosphere into an oven and I was just a few degrees away from a double cocktail of heat-stroke and insanity, my body ached all over from lots of heavy lifting to set up my new flat which was far removed from my strength, I had just been rejected from my first choice of employment and had to settle for my second one and to top it all off I couldn’t get to sleep because I was melting into a puddle of sweat. My girlfriend then proposed we go watch a movie, and seeing that Space Jam 2 (2021) was making its rounds on the screen that propelled itself to be the obvious choice. Maybe this film will take my mind off my towering trials, I thought. That it would most certainly go to do but it would also take my mind off a bunch of other things, like breathing and thinking, but we’ll get to that later. We arrived at the Odeon in Camden and it was completely deserted. The general atmosphere of despair was so thick in the place that the few staff members who found themselves unfortunate to be working at that time were one small misfortune away from a complete mental and physical collapse, and you could vividly make that out from their saturnine expressions. A powerful need for pop-corn was aroused in my mind so I asked for some and got a heavy serving of cold looks and stale week-old pop-corn. With our dried-up snacks and an ominous sense of foreboding we walked into the cinema screen to find that no sound accompanied the picture. At this point my brain had become so desensitised to the world around me that no trouble or set-back could leave anymore scratches on my messed-up perception, so I went and alerted the zombie-like staff of this problem and they swiftly fixed it, because what the hell else are they supposed to do? Just when our problems had reached precipitous heights, the film began.
To the viewer who hasn’t seen this yet, you’d think this is targeted at the audiences who grew up with the first Space Jam (1996). Let’s not kid ourselves, no one thought this film was going to be good, it’s a balefully flagrant cash-grab at the nostalgia that people attach to the first film. “If this film is even half as good as the first one, it must be worth watching right?” is what I imagine the undiscerning audience member who’s about to buy a ticket would say. Warner Bros. knows there’s an audience out there who loved the first one, so let’s slap the name on this new one and serve it to them on a plate of terrible CGI. It all ultimately boils down to the fact that no one asked for this.
The film begins, opening with some lovely subtle flourishes of animation upon live-action footage of Le-Bron James playing some B-Ball. As the circus progresses, the animation builds up its intensity, reaching a fine peak when Le-Bron ends up in Tune World and recruits the Tune Squad for his team. That classic, unmistakable animation style is executed so immaculately and injected with precision into some live-action sequences. But then like an aggressive form of cancer, the animation continues to multiply and spread once the nuclear blast of CGI levels the film into a flat and hollow heath. Complete pandemonium ensues in the frame where with each passing second the amount of stuff happening in each moment doubles, triples, quadruples with exponential degrees until the frame is a dizzying vortex of CG and colour. These violently lurid sights are such a tiring force on the eyes that it takes it out of you completely. You have no idea what to focus on, where to look and what in the goddamn hell is happening. I’d like to think I’m not a complete imbecile, I could keep up with the blistering mess that they call the pacing of this film and could follow what was going on, but the amount of craziness that unfolds on the screen at any given moment doesn’t make it any easier for the audience to enjoy it. I mentioned earlier that the first impression one gets is that the film is aimed at an audience how have watched the first one, well that’s complete bullshit as it’s aimed at a much younger audience, one that has an attention span of picoseconds, one who live and breathe the cyberspace through video games and constant exposure to the internet. Before the average adult audience can even get a handle on what is happening at the moment, the film is ten paces ahead of you, which forces you to just skip ahead with it only to find out it’s left you behind in the dust. If you have kids under the age of ten, take them to watch it because they’ll have a blast and you in the meantime can take a nice nap.
I’m not going to be that contrarian anachronist bastard who says, “CGI is the worst, we must stick to traditional forms of animation”, though I do have the resolution in my own beliefs to admit that full-blown CGI isn’t my cup of tea, I prefer the more subtle uses of it. The point I’m trying to illustrate here is that hybrid films which marry two distinct visual mediums together work on the virtue that there’s a clear divider between the two forms as they dance around each other. With CGI on the other hand, it doesn’t work as well because computer generated animation is striving to be as photorealistic as possible, to supplant real-life if you will, so to make a hybrid film consisting of one part live-action and then the rest CGI just doesn’t fly as well. Both emulsify into one indistinguishable entity and the hybridity is lost. To me, modern CG animated films look no different from one another.
Even if you’re immune to the completely exhausting influence of the animation here, the bed upon which the film lay is a very weak one. The plot is as thin as an atom and the events are completely predictable. The opening of the film is perched on a such a vantage point that you can easily discern the ending down in the valley below. Things happen for seemingly for no reason other than to forcibly shove the plot along and the whole thing is just completely stupid. That last statement sounds a bit strange doesn’t it because the Looney Tunes are inherently stupid, their DNA is practically whimsical, so why is stupidity here a bad thing? Because it lacks all the charm and wit of the Looney Tunes slapstick. It’s stupid in the gravest sense of the word.
As if there weren’t enough reasons to scowl at this film, the entire affair is just Warner Bros. masturbating over their reflection, showing off exactly how many things they own the rights to. Every single frame is a reference to something and it’s a bit of fun to begin with but after two hours of constant finger-pointing it gets extremely laborious. This shallow pastiche is the scourge which enforces the stigma that post-modernism is an era of creative regression, when what we really need is for films and other forms of media to prove the opposite.
But we really can’t expect a film like Space Jam 2 to contribute in this vast pool of artistic discourse. It’s just animated character playing basketball alongside real-life players. However, if you want the same premise but done properly, just watch the first one.
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