This sort of blasphemy is the only thing that can make a movie like “Space Jam: A New Legacy” work. The movies, cartoons and TV shows from bygone eras aren’t here to do anything they’re on display like Christmas toys in a shop window. Foghorn Leghorn, wearing a long white wig, whooshes past the screen atop a “Game of Thrones” dragon. All, that is, except the "Looney Tunes" characters, who have been spread out among several of the worlds: Granny and Speedy Gonzales (now just called Speedy) hang out in “The Matrix,” Yosemite Sam plays piano in “Casablanca” and Daffy Duck causes disasters that Superman has to stop. Entertainment properties live on their own little planets. When LeBron wisely rejects this idea, Al-G gets mad and forces him into the metaworld of The Serververse, where all the Warner Bros. I don’t know the name of the real-life sentient marketing computer that must have greenlighted “Space Jam: A New Legacy.”) Al-G wants LeBron to allow himself to be digitized and inserted into the studio’s intellectual property library. (I want to emphasize that this all takes place in the world of the movie. Entertainment that has developed sentience, prefers to be called Al-G Rhythm and is played by Don Cheadle. Providing those is a programming algorithm at Warner Bros. But this whole project really has no reason to exist without a fire hose of product placement, so the father-son reconciliation must take place inside an obligatory multiverse composed of stale inside jokes. Lee seems to want this to be a movie about learning to be a better dad. In “A New Legacy,” James actually allows the screenwriters to give him a role (and he’s a better actor than Jordan), so we see his character take that early reprimand to heart and try to discipline his middle-schooler Dom (Cedric Joe, who is admittedly terrific) like a coach, rather than a father.ĭirector Malcolm D. So far, so good: The original “Space Jam” was an 88-minute commercial for Jordan’s enormous self-regard (and various Happy Meal tie-in toys), and so Jordan’s character could seemingly do no wrong.
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