115 min | PG | July 16, 2021 | Warner Bros. Pictures
LeBron James gets trapped inside the Warner Bros. server-verse and has to coach the Looney Tunes to victory to free his kidnapped son. The villain is a rogue algorithm. The real product is the catalog.
LeBron James plays a fictionalized version of himself, a basketball superstar who wants his son to follow him into the game. The son wants to build video games instead. A Warner Bros. algorithm named Al G. Rhythm kidnaps the boy into a digital realm called the Serververse. To get him back, LeBron must win a basketball game with the Looney Tunes as his team. The premise is a hostage negotiation conducted through brand synergy. The film is a tour of the Warner Bros. catalog wearing the costume of a father-son story.
James plays LeBron James and never locates the character. He delivers his lines with the stiffness of a man reading off a sponsor’s card. Don Cheadle plays Al G. Rhythm, the rogue algorithm, with theatrical commitment the material does not earn. Cheadle goes big and supplies the film its only pulse. Cedric Joe plays Dom, the son, with earnest energy that the script flattens into a plot mechanism. Zendaya voices Lola Bunny and Jeff Bergman voices Bugs Bunny, and both vanish under the spectacle stacked on top of them.
Malcolm D. Lee directs a movie assembled by committee. Six writers share the screenplay credit, and the seams show in every tonal lurch. The film abandons the hand-drawn animation of its predecessor and converts the Looney Tunes into glossy 3D models for the climactic game. The change drains Bugs and Daffy of the rubbery physicality that defined them. The crowd at that final game is packed with Warner Bros. characters who have no reason to share a frame, from the droogs of A Clockwork Orange to the killer clown of It. The choice turns the arena into a licensing audit.
This is a film with nothing to sell except itself. The 1996 original knew it was a novelty and built its jokes around the absurdity of pairing an athlete with cartoons. This version takes the absurdity seriously and swaps the jokes for inventory. Every scene gestures at another property you could be watching instead. The father-son story exists only to give the catalog a frame. The frame is the whole movie.