Written by: Juel Taylor, Tony Rettenmaier, Keenan Coogler, Terence Nance, Jesse Gordon, Celeste Ballard
Starring: LeBron James, Don Cheadle, Khris Davis, Sonequa Martin-Green
Rating: [1/5]
Past failure should serve as a great tool to avoid making the same mistake once again. Something sequels have the ability to do with the benefit of hindsight providing the pitfalls one must avoid. However, this comes with the notion of acknowledging the mistakes made before, which were not taken in properly when deciding to make Space Jam: A New Legacy. Somehow even worse than its predecessor and far more morally bankrupt.
Trying to encourage his two sons to follow his path as a basketball player, LeBron James pushes his son, Dom (Cedric Joe) too far, who would rather work in the video game world. During a pitch that went wrong, they both get sucked into Warner Bros’s serververse where an artificial intelligence decides LeBron must defeat its basketball team in order to escape safely with this son.
The lack of acknowledgment of the disastrous 1996 Space Jam made way for what we received in this film as the studio did not receive enough lambasting for how it crafted such a soulless feature held together by the power of nostalgia. It gave the studio the belief we wanted more junk at made it even worse with the idea of this taking place within the entire library of Warner Bros where the feature operates as nothing more than a commercial for the other properties held under the umbrella. At least the first film only limited itself to some degree, but A New Legacy decides they will try to make reference to every single popular piece of intellectual property they could fit on the screen.
This appears at its most heinous in the final basketball game where you can press pause and try to pick out every ancillary figure in the background owned by the studio. Heck, you even somehow have the droogs from A Clockwork Orange, you know a bunch of rapists, watching the game in this kid-friendly movie. If crafted by different minds one could hold the opinion this feature seeks to mock the very idea of this gathering of intellectual property, but that would require some acknowledgment of shame, which this feature contains absolutely none of. Instead, we get an assault of recognizable characters taking the stage here making you lose sight of the truly putrid story at the center.
Amongst all of the dreck this feature tries to present the all-too-familiar ‘baseball is your dream, dad” story involving LeBron’s son where he must learn to let his son grow in his own way. Something the film could have driven to have more emotional significance if not for its insistence in trying to show off The Iron Giant and the “Game of Thrones” introduction as LeBron flies through these worlds. Instead, any real character work gets thrown by the wayside because they want to ensure everything in their catalog receives some recognition and shine. LeBron gets left to drown as someone already not trained as an actor but what he receives should be classified as artistic abuse. He has the horrid task of trying to sell the emotional aspects of this feature where none exists and dedicates so little time to trying to establish any of it.
With the rise of artificial intelligence in everyday life, it becomes quite the comedic experience writing about this feature with its release a few years ago. Especially with a studio like Warner Bros embracing the reliance on artificial intelligence while displaying it as a villain within the commercial for its studio. This ridiculousness ultimately sums up everything that cannot be taken seriously about this film. It sought to be nothing more than unironic product placement and perhaps throw in a basketball game because this needs to resemble Space Jam in having Looney Tunes take on some overpowered villains in the athletic competition. Truly a soulless exercise that somehow makes the original look like a competent film, which is quite an incalculable feat. Toss it in the bin and shame to anyone involved as this feature represents nothing about what art should be but rather how a studio can capitalize on corporate synergy and claim it exists as a movie. Nostalgia surely will not save this one’s reputation or we will fall into the same trap once again thirty years later with another iteration starring the next great basketball player.
Films with Josh 