Watching director Joe Dante's Looney Tunes: Back in Action (2003) is the cinematic equivalent of being strapped to the front of a roller coaster with clever quips and visual gags being thrown at the audience at a hundred miles per hour without signs of stopping. That said, I enjoyed just about every second of this movie. This kind of experience may turn some people off, but it delighted me from start to finish.
The movie follows Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck (both voiced by Joe Alaskey), as they find themselves helping former Warner Bros. security guard and stuntman Damian "D.J." Drake, Jr. (played by Brendan Fraser) and no-nonsense studio executive Kate Houghton (played by Jenna Elfman) on their quest to stop the maniacal Mr. Chairman (played by Steve Martin) of the Acme Corporation from getting his hands on the "Blue Monkey" diamond and using its mysterious powers to transform humanity into literal monkeys for Acme's labor force. There is also a subplot involving D.J. having to save his father, Damian Drake (played by Timothy Dalton), a former James Bond-esque action star, from captivity by Mr. Chairman, which is quite funny in and of itself, given that Dalton had portrayed 007 twice in the 1980s.
Performance-wise, Fraser's everyman charm and likability apply here and serve as a great straight man to Daffy Duck's screwy antics. Elfman's strict and by-the-book demeanor as a Warner Bros. executive trying to deal with Bugs Bunny's looniness. However, when it comes to the inevitable romance between D.J. and Kate, there is a noticeable lack of romantic chemistry between them; perhaps it was because of how thinly written the actors' material was. As for the film's highlight, Martin shines as Mr. Chairman, with his hyperactive and over-the-top personality, which feels like a role that the late Robin Williams would have been born to play.
On a technical level, Dante's blending of live-action actors with the traditionally animated characters (brought to life by Disney animation legend Eric Goldberg) is on par with (or dare I say, slightly better than) the sequences Robert Zemeckis and animation director Richard Williams brought to the screen in Disney's Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988). Although the plot and character depth for the human characters for this movie are very thin (and quite ludicrous), with much of its emphasis on the Looney Tunes gang and their comedic hi-jinks with the two human leads, it succeeds in capturing the zany and anarchic spirit of the Looney Tunes cartoons. One of Dante's signatures is his tongue-in-cheek references to not only classic horror and science fiction works but also inside jokes about Hollywood politics, and this film is no exception. For example, there is a hilarious shot-for-shot parody of the shower scene from Psycho (1960), a meta-joke at the Warner Bros. commissary where an animated Shaggy and Scooby-Doo berate Matthew Lillard for his performance as Shaggy in the live-action adaptation of Scooby-Doo (2002), and a blink-and-you'll-miss-it cameo from Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)'s Kevin McCarthy carrying a pod from that film.
As I mentioned in my Space Jam (1996) review, original Looney Tunes animator Chuck Jones was highly critical of Space Jam and its characterizations of the animated figures. Given Dante's love and affection for Jones (he frequently cited or referenced Jones' work in his projects like Gremlins (1984) and its 1990 sequel, for which Jones himself directed and animated the movie's opening and closing credits featuring, you guessed it, Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, and Porky Pig), this film feels like a direct response to Jones' criticisms, and an effort by Dante to honor his friend by accurately depicting the characters he brought to life years ago.
On a side-note, the Warner Bros. executives (played by real-life twins Don & Dan Stanton) are satirically portrayed as clueless and out-of-touch buffoons. Later, I was surprised to learn that their portrayal was not far off from who Dante had to answer to during this movie's production. According to Dante, whatever he shot, the executives demanded changes that resulted in a film that had "a different beginning, middle, and end than the one he signed on to do." Dante is even quoted as saying in a 2009 interview with the horror film magazine Fangoria:
"As for Looney Tunes: Back in Action, the less said the better. It was a nightmarish year and a half of my life that I'll never get back, and if I had to do it over, I wouldn't."
In conclusion, knowing what happened during production makes me a little sad that this project was Joe Dante's last Hollywood movie before moving on to television and independent projects. However, Looney Tunes: Back in Action is still a fast-paced and consistently funny ride regardless of its behind-the-scenes drama. The scenes with the human characters are pretty underwritten, but the animated characters and their comedic chops shine.
Final Score: 8 out of 10
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