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Movie Review: Space Jam: A New Legacy

Mike Tyrkus

Although the debate will undoubtedly continue among basketball fans as to which player is the greatest in history when comparing LeBron James and Michael Jordan, the same cannot be said of the two “Space Jam” films that each NBA superstar has subsequently starred in at the height of their respective popularity. While it succeeds as being an entertaining animation hybrid with enough eye candy to make your head spin—or at least keep it occupied for a but—the hollow center of Space Jam: A New Legacy repeatedly blocks the film’s attempts to offer anything more than a slightly entertaining diversion, rendering it little more than a second chapter that perhaps was never really needed in the first place.

A sequel of sorts to the 1996 film Space Jam, which pitted the Looney Tunes gang alongside retired basketball great Michael Jordan against a team of monsters embowed with the stolen basketball skills of several NBA superstars in an effort to win the animated heroes their freedom from a diabolical amusement park owner, Space Jam: A New Legacy is instead built upon James’s fractured relationship with his son Dom (Cedric Joe) and the nefarious artificial intelligence created by Warner Brothers to write film scripts, Al G. Rhythm (Don Cheadle). Feeling slighted after James rejects a script that was intended to star James, Rhythm pulls James and his son into the digital landscape and orchestrates a father-son “hoops” challenge between Rhythm and Dom’s “monsterized” versions of NBA and WNBA superstars and the rag-tag band of Loony Tunes that James gathers as a sort of ad hoc team.

Director Malcolm D. Lee, who has helmed films in the “Best Man” franchise, does a decent enough job of keeping the excitement of the actual basketball game centering the film moving along on screen, but he, like the story itself, loses his way when plot definition and character depth are required. Scripted by a total of no less than six writers, the film feels lost in an overly ambitious sort of way. It is as though the emotional core of the film was simply expected to show up and choose from one of the many through lines that would serve as an adequate enough plot for countless other films, but that never happens. Instead, there is simply too much going on throughout without anything of substance ever actually occurring.

All this is not to say that Space Jam: A New Legacy is a bad film. It’s not. It’s simply not a good one or, at least as good as it could have been. There was (and is) potential here and there is a surprising amount of entertainment present that make the whole enterprise a lot more disappointing than it probably should have been.

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Mike Tyrkus

Editor in Chief at CinemaNerdz.com
An independent filmmaker, co-writer and director of over a dozen short films, the Editor in Chief of CinemaNerdz.com has spent much of the last three decades as a writer and editor specializing in biographical and critical reference sources in literature and the cinema, beginning in February 1991 reviewing films for his college newspaper. He was a member of the Detroit Film Critics Society, as well as the group's webmaster and one-time President for over a decade until the group ceased to exist. His contributions to film criticism can be found in Magill's Cinema Annual, VideoHound's Golden Movie Retriever (of which he was the editor for nearly a decade until it too ceased to exist), the International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers, and the St. James Film Directors Encyclopedia (on which he collaborated with editor Andrew Sarris). He has also appeared on the television program Critic LEE Speaking alongside Lee Thomas of FOX2 and Adam Graham, of The Detroit News. He currently lives in the Detroit area with his wife and their dogs.

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