Space Jam (1996) Review

rating: ***

the story: Michael Jordan ends up playing basketball with the animated cast of Looney Tunes.

review: I didn't actually get around to watching this until this year.  Given how much my family enjoyed Looney Tunes, this seems a little absurd.  Given how much at least one member of the family was into basketball in the '90s, it's doubly absurd.  As it turns out, Space Jam is great as a time capsule for that '90s basketball era, as it's pretty entertaining otherwise.

If you honestly expect more than that, you're asking too much.  Michael Jordan was one of the cultural touchstones of the era, when athlete celebrities were all over the pop landscape.  You would be equally foolish to expect great acting from him.  That would be well beside the point.  Something I didn't know until watching it is that Space Jam also acts as a reprise of the old commercials Jordan and Larry Bird made back then.  Playing third fiddle to them, as always, is Charles Barkley (but don't tell my brother that), and a host of other recognizable players populate what's left after you add in Bugs Bunny and most of his well-known cartoon associates, as well as the aliens led a stooge voiced by Danny DeVito.

The result isn't high, or even close to it, but for sheer nostalgia's sake, it's good enough.  Normally nostalgia is about remembering a specific thing or elements of an era, but Space Jam achieves it by evoking and borrowing elements, which is a special kind of distinction.  I don't know if the filmmakers could possibly have been banking on this, and very likely it was the furthest thing from their minds, because in Hollywood, as in life, usually the next possible moment is the most important one, to capture immediate attention.  If something becomes a classic it's usually because it was instantly massively popular.  Space Jam wasn't a huge success, but it certainly had people talking, and it's become a kind of cult classic, which belatedly spawned a sequel (which, of course, I haven't seen yet, but soon!), which only time can tell if it evokes its era as successfully.

The other big surprise, for me, was Bill Murray.  In 1996, Murray was in the midst of a career transition.  He'd made his most popular '90s films already, and was years away from a critical revival.  You won't often see him as a selling point for Space Jam, in other words, because at the time, it just didn't seem relevant anymore.  But for me, in 2022, seeing him pop up in a supporting role can only be described as sheer pleasure, and the needed element in turning Space Jam from mere nostalgia to a repeatable experience.  

It's also interesting that the whole movie pivots around Michael Jordan's real life attempt to switch sports from basketball to baseball, which was quickly reversed with little help from cartoon shenanigans.  In hindsight it makes the results all the more relevant.  Bugs, meanwhile, was struggling, too, with whether it was still important that there was a Bugs Bunny anymore.  On TV, there was a new generation of his ilk in Tiny Toons, while The Animaniacs was busy making the argument that even they weren't headlining the conversation.  While Disney constantly reshuffles Mickey, Bugs at one point had such a radical redesign, around this time, you wouldn't even have known it was him without being told.  He and his friends now existed, if at all, in hybrid movies like this, or in the classic cartoons.  One thing Mickey never got was a movie like this, though.

Space Jam should never be confused for great filmmaking, but it's a rewarding curiosity, on a number of levels.