Space Jam: A New Legacy

Space Jam 2: A New Lega­cy opens with a teenaged LeBron James get­ting dropped off at a bas­ket­ball game his moth­er is unable to attend. He enters the gym down­trod­den but is soon perked up by his friend gift­ing him an old Nin­ten­do Game Boy. After receiv­ing a stern talk­ing to from his coach for focus­ing on a dif­fer­ent game, we’re trans­port­ed through an open­ing cred­its sequence that high­lights every­thing LeBron would go on to achieve through­out his career. Even­tu­al­ly we land in a present day Los Ange­les man­sion, where LeBron is giv­ing the same speech to his youngest son, aspir­ing video game cre­ator Dom (Cedric Joe).

The film’s flim­sy premise is based on the age-old con­flict between Accom­plished Father and Dis­ap­point­ing Son. At first the com­mit­ted ​“fam­i­ly man” and ​“great­est ath­lete in the world” strug­gles to under­stand Dom – until he is forced to do so by malev­o­lent sen­ti­ment com­put­er pro­gramme Al G Rhythm (Don Chea­dle), who sucks father and son into the Warn­er Bros ​‘Server­verse’ (stu­dio archive), forc­ing them to face off in a game of ​‘Dom Ball’ for the fate of the Looney Tunes and themselves.

On the sur­face, this long-belat­ed sequel is lit­tle more than a nos­tal­gic cash-grab for Warn­er Bros and a self-con­scious exer­cise in myth-mak­ing for LeBron James. But when you look deep­er inside Space Jam 2: A New Lega­cy it becomes even more cyn­i­cal and sin­is­ter. The film’s antag­o­nist, Al G Rhythm (effec­tive­ly WB per­son­i­fied), is threat­en­ing to erase the studio’s archive in favour of absorb­ing a celebri­ty into the Server­verse, and wants to use mass sur­veil­lance tech to trans­form the every­day social media user into the entertainment.

Chea­dle is clear­ly hav­ing the time of his life play­ing the evil AI, doing his worst impres­sion of a Shake­speare­an mad­man (how you might have envi­sioned many actors spend­ing time in lock­down). LeBron, mean­while, turns in a stilt­ed per­for­mance as him­self (“Ath­letes and act­ing, it nev­er goes well!” he chimes iron­i­cal­ly ear­ly on), which is a shame con­sid­er­ing his scenes with Bill Had­er were the most enjoy­able parts of Judd Apatow’s Train­wreck. As for any excite­ment over Zen­daya voic­ing a new-look Lola Bun­ny, if her name weren’t on the poster, you’d hard­ly know.

As LeBron bounces around the Server­verse reassem­bling the scat­tered Looney Tunes for the big game, Warn­er Bros (via ​“direc­tor” Mal­colm D Lee) choose to flex their IP mus­cle instead of telling a coher­ent sto­ry: we pick up Daffy Duck in Gotham City; Yosemite Sam in Casablan­ca (‘play it again, Sam’…); and dis­cov­er Granny in The Matrix for some reason.

Dur­ing the cli­mac­tic show­down the audi­ence is lit­tered with fig­ures from the WB cat­a­logue: Har­ry Pot­ter, var­i­ous char­ac­ters from Game of Thrones and Alex’s Droogs from A Clock­work Orange are recog­nis­able through cheap fan­cy dress, with King Kong awk­ward­ly tow­er­ing over them. They’re not par­tic­i­pat­ing in the match, but WB wants you to know that they own them, too. An exhaust­ing, visu­al­ly gar­ish exer­cise in brand syn­er­gy, this soul­less reboot fails even to effec­tive­ly cap­i­talise on its own nostalgia.