The new Looney Tunes movie is a pleasant, safe and enjoyable family film—which is exactly what's wrong with it. Or at least, that's why I was somewhat disappointed with it.
As an admirer of subversive director Joe Dante, and Chuck Jones' caustic Looney Tunes shorts, I expected something with a bit more bite.
That most people going to Looney Tunes: Back In Action are only expecting harmless kiddie-fare speaks volumes about the power of major studios to overwhelm filmmakers' personalities. The audience isn't going to see the new Dante film; they're going to see Bugs and Daffy.
Dante is an undervalued filmmaker, and his work should have a greater importance to a studio than cashing in on a profitable franchise. It was only a matter of time before Dante, an aficionado of Looney Tunes and '50s and '60s sci-fi and horror flicks, was given such a job, but the folks at Warner Bros. aren't about to let him mess with their most recognizable product.
His most trenchant films are dark satire, using seemingly innocuous playthings—pets and toys in Gremlins and Small Soldiers, movies and TV in Matinee and Explorers —to make observations about violence in both real life and the media.
The movie begins with a Warner Bros. veep (Jenna Elfman) firing both Daffy and failed stuntman Brendan Fraser from the latest Bugs Bunny movie. When she in turn is fired, the plot disintegrates into an inane adventure to find a mystical diamond and stop Steve Martin's evil Acme Corp. from turning the world into enslaved monkeys. Martin's over-the-top performance is just annoying, but Joan Cusack is hysterical as an operative in a secret military base dubbed Area 52.
Fortunately, Dante's creativity shines through, with innumerable clever movie references flying by. Children may recognize spoofs of Raiders of the Lost Ark and even Psycho, though nods to Invasion of the Body Snatchers and This Island Earth will likely go over their heads. Best of all is an inspired sequence involving a chase through the paintings in the Louvre. Each artist's style manipulates the characters, with Salvador Dali's "The Persistence of Memory" melting them in hilarious fashion.
But there's no reason why a youngster couldn't comprehend more than an exceptionally inane plot. Perhaps the problem is that, unlike most of Dante's features, there are no child characters—just a bunch of characters acting childish.