I've had this nightmare before.
C'Mon and SLAM...
One of my New Year's resolutions was that I was going to stop trying to review good or even mediocre movies on this blog. I find it difficult to talk about them because I don't want to spoil to much and I feel like I'm never quite explaining why I like them well enough. I saw Gone Girl and Battle of Five Armies recently and they were both great movies, but you won't see me talking about them here because I don't know how to explain why they're great.
Thankfully Space Jam from 1996 is not a good movie. So suit up your Nike's, we gonna slam.
Space Jam is an oddity, like it knows it shouldn't exist. There is no reason for Space Jam, it serves no purpose in the grand scheme of things, save perhaps to introduce a new face to the Looney Toons line-up. It's product placements are bizarre, it's casting atrocious, and even it's jokes vary widely from basic slapstick to meta-humor. It's a movie made by people that don't know what movies are, what kids are, and who exist solely to produce bottom denominator crap for the masses and sell toys.
...And welcome to the JAM!
Bill Murray is in this, because he wandered onto the wrong set.
Let's look at the setup for this ridiculous experiment. The movie opens on Moron Mountain, a shitty interstellar themepark run by Swackhammer (Danny Devito). The park sucks ass, so Swackhammer decides he's going to kidnap the Looney Tunes and make them perform. To accomplish this he sends his group of minions, who never get names and are all extremely short. Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Sylvester the Cat, Elmer Fudd, and Porky Pig decide the best way to beat the aliens is to challenge them to a basketball game, since they're short and can't jump.
Seriously, that's the logic. In fairness to the movie, it kind of admit's its a really dumb idea, but the Looney Tunes are desperate.
Meanwhile back in our world, Michael Jordan, one of the greatest basketball players ever, friend to everyone, world star parent, and loving father is doing terribly in his new career as a baseball player. This is sort of based on Jordan's actual short lived baseball career in the '93-'94 season, and oddly serves as a crux for much of the film.
We return to Looney Tune world, where the alien minions have stolen the talent of five basketball players, and have transformed themselves into super monster basketball all-stars, the Mon-Stars if you will. For some reason Bugs and the gang decide to kidnap Michael Jordan and get him to coach their team to victory. Jordan agrees, reluctantly, and trains the team in a series of slapstick vignettes befitting the Looney Tunes style.
I need to wipe my browser history now.
Then there's Lola Bunny, pictured above, a character that no doubt stirred up a lot of uncomfortable feelings in young men of the '90s. Her character is, at best, unnecessary. She serves as a sort of Mini Mouse component for Bugs, but she's also a strong willed independent woman. At least, she was in Space Jam, since apparently the character has now been relegated to ditsy obsessive girlfriend with a huge character design overhaul. Regardless, her and Bug's entire romantic subplot is completely wasted, with the film only bringing it up two, maybe three times with no real purpose. It'd be tempting to call her the reason for the film, but that'd be stupid.
And you thought DayZ was the scariest game mod ever.
Besides, the real reason for Space Jam is all the marketing. The Looney Tunes may avoid being put on display in Moron Mountain, but that didn't stop this movie from become a real-world marketing machine. There are hundreds of product placements throughout Space Jam, culminating in this line from Wayne Knight's character Stanley:
"C'mon, Michael! It's game time! Get your Hanes on, lace up your Nikes, grab your Wheaties and your Gatorade, and we'll pick up a Big Mac on the way to the ballpark. "
That's the movie in a nutshell, selling as much shit to kids as possible. It might not be as bad as, say, The Wizard, but it's pretty clear this was written by a marketing team before the director got his hands on it. Hell, the damn website for Space Jam is still fucking operational if you want to see.
'Cause it's the SLAM JAM!
Bugs and Lola's sideplot is one of the worst parts of the movie.
I will say this in Space Jam's favor: for what it's trying to be, it almost does it right. Michael Jordan isn't an actor, so Space Jam doesn't put him in any situations that really require acting. Even more in Jordan's defense his interactions with the Looney Tunes themselves are impressive, considering they don't exist. The Tunes themselves are faithful to their characters, and the story almost feels like it could work in the Looney Tunes universe. The characters are all in-character and they manage more then a few decent jokes.
That reminded me, the jokes. They're strange. I've read that the Looney Tunes aren't really meant for kids, and that they used the slapstick comedy as a cover for their deeper motives. There's certainly a hint of truth to that, and watching a lot of the older cartoons as an adult it's easier to pick out the hidden messages behind the wacky humour.
The animation quality is great, especially on the MonStars.
But in Space Jam, we're looking at a new age of Looney Tunes, one for the 90's. The jokes are weirdly meta, sometimes poking fun at the very nature of the Looney Tunes. In particular, there's a moment where Bugs and Daffy are discussing royalties from Looney Tunes merchandising, and lamenting at their lack of a cut. It's an especially weird moment in a kids movie.
Perhaps the crowning achievement for this is whenever Bill Murray is on-screen. He only appears twice, once to make a joke about being white, and another time to get confused with Dan Aykroyd. These are both jokes that the target audience for Space Jam just wouldn't get. There are dozens of these littered throughout the film, like Bugs making a boner joke, a Pulp Fiction reference, Patrick Ewing's sexual performance being questioned. Shit, the soundtrack for Space Jam features an R. Kelly song (I believe I can fly) and a Barry White Song (What the fuck am I reading?).
Actual image from the Space Jam comic book.
I have this theory about Space Jam. I imagine the production staff figuring out how shitty this movie was destined to be early in development, so they tried their absolute damndest to make it as weird as possible. Whenever they felt something was to normal, they'd knock it back with something completely weird. The whole movie is constantly revolting against itself, writhing in pain at it's own existence.
There are people that will defend Space Jam as a good movie. Hell, like most shitty things from the 90's there's at least seven different Buzzfeed "articles" about it (I'm not joking). I once loved Space Jam, and I must've watched it at least once a week when I was a kid. Here's the thing though, when I was a kid I also hated wearing underwear and loved throwing boogers at girls I liked. Things from our childhood are never as good in retrospective, and Space Jam serves as a giant, confusing monument to that. It's all things 90's rolled into one, and a reminder of why that's a bad thing.
image sources:http://assets.nydailynews.com/polopoly_fs/1.1678204!/img/httpImage/image.jpg_gen/derivatives/article_970/article-spacejamweb-0221.jpg
http://www.joblo.com/newsimages1/15-After_training_by_spirittolol.jpg
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http://www.arttheater.coop/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Space-Jam-620x350.png
http://cstpdx.com/sites/clinton/files/83891_47751_691_space_jam.jpg
http://wac.450f.edgecastcdn.net/80450F/comicsalliance.com/files/2014/03/SpaceJam01.jpg
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