a review of 巨星总动员

FLOPUARY #8: Glad to have finally caught up with this one, after being wholly turned off by the unfathomable branding exercises represented by the SPACE JAM movies. It definitely qualifies more as a straight-up B-movie version of what Robert Zemeckis and his effects team achieved 15 years earlier with WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT?, but the faster/weirder/more anarchic nature of this film is entirely Joe Dante's forte, and he brings some wonderful energy to the direction. Plus the Looney Tunes characters actually get to do JOKES! Suited to their personalities! Unlike the dull-witted novelty t-shirt level humor of SPACE JAM or other recent attempts at Bugs/Daffy/et al, this movie understands not only the original characters but also their inherent comedic antagonist/foil relationships to each other. I also really enjoyed Brendan Fraser in this movie, and feel like maybe I didn't appreciate him as much back in the day. Tempted to go back and rewatch some of his comedies as well as the Mummy films just to see his action-comedy chops. It occurs to me that this movie has commonalities with both of the high-profile movies that WB-Discovery has famously axed for tax purposes over the last year or so; If CEO David Zaslav gets his way we'll never get to see a resurgent Fraser as the villain in BATGIRL, nor will we get to see the animated/live-action legal hilarity of COYOTE VS. ACME. It's a reminder of how thoroughly WBD is currently torching its own legacy as a studio.