Looney Tunes: Back in Action

Follow up:

Or the movie that threatened to kill the careers of Brendan Fraiser, Steve Martin and succeeded in killing the Looney Tunes

Yesterday I found a copy of Looney Tunes: Back in Action at a garage sale, and had been wanting to see it since it came out. When the movie came out, it flopped really badly, and since then the Looney Tunes have all but disappeared, unless you count that really stupid badly animated series from a couple years back: Loonatics Unleashed. I never really heard anything about the movie, good or bad, so I wanted to see for myself what it's all about.

Daffy Duck and Bugs Bunny are shooting a movie together but when Daffy complains that yet again, he gets all the hits while Bugs gets all the laughs, he gets fired by the icy VP of Comedy (Jenna Elfman). But Daffy isn't ready to lose his job without a fight, and through an incident involving the Batmobile manages to get DJ Drake (Brendan Fraiser) the security guard fired as well. DJ is actually the son of Damian Drake (Timothy Daulton), Warner Bros most popular actor, but wanted no one to know so he could become a stuntman without his father's help. Daffy discovers this secret as well as another. Damian Drake isn't just an actor who plays a spy, but is also a real spy who was captured by the evil head of the Acme Corporation (Steve Martin) and now it's up to DJ to take up his father's mission and get a giant Diamond called the Blue Monkey. Hearing about the diamond Daffy decides he wants to help, and wants to be a hero for once to upstage Bugs. Meanwhile, the VP is threatened with being fired if she doesn't get Daffy back because Bugs refuses to work without him. They eventually catch up to DJ and Daffy and learn that the Blue Monkey actually has to power to turn people into Monkeys and the head of Acme wants it so he can turn everyone to a primate, make them work in his factories for free and force them to buy the products they make.

The storyline is extremely silly, but considering it's a Looney Tunes movie I wouldn't expect anything else. So I actually liked the story, and a lot of the sight gags were hilarious as well as some great set pieces with Bugs and Daffy jumping in and out of paintings to escape Elmer Fudd. Some of the cameos were really good too, including Shaggy yelling at Brian Austin Green about his performance in Scooby Doo. I just wish there were more cameos, like the Warner Brothers and Warner sister in the water tower when it got knocked over, and more of the actual tunes, as even the most popular characters only got some screen time, and most were working for the villain. I also didn't like that some scenes were too sexualized. Considering this movie was for kids a scene with Heather Locklear changing and her wearing lingerie.

The two biggest problems with this movie were the effects and the directing. In Who Framed Rodger Rabbit? and even Spacejam, cartoon characters started to be integrated into their scenes, with it looking like they actually interact with their environment, and have real weight and real shadows. While the CGI was okay for the time, all the Looney Tunes looked like they were pasted into the scenes, instead of part of them. And I found this extremely distracting. Also the directing was terrible. Steve Martin was waaay over the top and it seemed like all the actors were doing a terrible job acting. So even though the movie was only 90 minutes, any time any of the actors spoke it felt like I wanted them to move onto the next scene. I also didn't like that the Tunes were part of our everyday world. In Spacejam, as 'meh' as it was, the idea of the Tunes having their own world worked. I missed that in this movie, and I also didn't understand why more characters weren't there. What happened to Lola Bunny?

I didn't hate the movie, and I enjoyed the plot, but I'm glad I didn't spend more than a quarter for the tape