LOONEY TUNES — BACK IN ACTION

Rating: 2

The wonderful thing about Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck when I was a kid was that they were deliciously subversive. I may not have known that word exactly, but I had no trouble understanding the concept, the which I latched onto with a full heart and a wicked delight that has endured to this day. The problem with LOONEY TUNES – BACK IN ACTION, is that it dilutes that wonderful tweak on the absurdity of convention with a live-action story that is as flat as Wile E. Coyote after yet another encounter with an airborne anvil from the Acme Company.

The premise has the gang from Looney Tunes, drawn as three-dimensionally as the silver screen allows without those annoying special glasses, working with real people a la ROGER RABBIT, but with considerably less success.  The humans, Brenden Fraser, Jenna Elfman, Timothy Dalton, and Steve Martin are ironically two-dimensional compared to the antics of the cartoons.  They all work together for Warner Brothers where a new Bugs Bunny film is in the works and Daffy is once again complaining about his part. That would be as the doofus who gets creamed at every turn. One thing leads to another and studio V.P. Elfman fires him and then gets fired herself for firing him when the picture suddenly has no punch line. With the help of studio security guard Fraser, they set out to find the duck, bring him back, and have a happy ending. Alas, there’s naughtiness afoot thanks to the Acme Company run by Martin doing what appears to be a very bad Jerry Lewis impression. Acme’s evil henchman, er, toons, have kidnapped Dalton, who is not only Fraser’s dad, but also the studio’s biggest star and a super secret agent, too. Now the gang has to find Daffy, save dad, and beat the bad guys to a diamond that turns people into monkeys.

The problems are legion. To name a few, first there’s the human dialogue. It has no snap, no sizzle, and certainly no bite. While Bugs is the eternal smart guy/ aleck and Daffy the eternal dunderhead with anger management issues, the actors are strictly foils for the animated characters to play off. Yet, they are so dull, you wonder why Bugs would bother and this is a rabbit that’s been amusing himself with Elmer Fudd for decades. Second, none of the humans seem to be interacting with the drawings. The line of sight is just ever so slightly off, or, rather, moves around independently from the animation. It’s as though the usual trick of having the actor look at a piece of tape dangling from a stick wasn’t used, or that the logistics of such a trick weren’t calibrated quite as finely as they could have been. Third, there’s a palpable lack of conviction on the part of any of the actors that they are actually talking to anything but thin air.  If they don’t believe, how can we? The only actor who seems to have gotten the point is Joan Cusak as Mother, the loopy mad scientist in charge of Area 52, where movie monsters are real and most of them make cameos.

It’s all just so much filler until we separate the toons from the trash and get some all-animated segments that have that old sneaky magic to them. Not to mention imagination. A frolic through the Louvre has Bugs, Daffy and a few others leaping into the paintings during a suitably wacky chase. They experience first hand the perils of pointillism in a Seraut, and the delights of Dali as their bodies melt and perspectives take on a mind of their own. Unfortunately, this happens 45 minutes into a film with a running time of just about twice that. By the time we get to the battle in outer space that pits Bugs and Daffy against Marvin the Martian, it’s too little, too late. Even Duck Dodgers can’t save it.

Here’s my suggestion to the fine folks at Warner Brothers. Next time out, lose the humans, stick with the toons, and subvert, ahem, entertain, a whole new generation of kids while delighting the grownups who never saw Bugs and company as something that needed to be outgrown.