The Iron Giant, Pennywise the Clown, The Mask, the 'Droogs' from A Clockwork Orange (what?! why?!) and far too many other cinematic icons are cobbled together here during the movie's climactic space jam, ready and waiting for you to play 'I spy' as you search for them amongst the game's crowd of onlookers. Rick's Café from Casablanca? Also here, with Yosemite Sam. The tornado sequence from The Wizard Of Oz? It's in here for a hot second. theme park, where every recognizable product from its vast catalog has been whittled down to a visual meme. While the original Space Jam concentrated its cross-universe appeal in getting MJ and his NBA pals (including Charles Barkley and Muggsy Bogues) together with the Looney Tunes, A New Legacy feels more like an overstimulating Warner Bros. Though as early as the first few minutes of the movie, when 1998 LeBron is seen briefly playing a Looney Tunes Gameboy game, you may begin to wonder who's being served more by this extremely self-referential exercise in corporate shilling: James or Warner Bros.? Honestly, the character motivations are so sleight and the plot machinations so convoluted, they mostly take a back seat to all of the self-mythologizing, of which there is a copious amount. (The studio bosses who pitch this idea to LeBron include Sarah Silverman and Steven Yeun, running away with those paychecks.) Rhythm (get it?), an AI figure played by a very game Don Cheadle who has an ax to grind with LeBron because the athlete clowned his idea to insert a digitized version of James into Warner Bros.

'server verse.' There they encounter Al G.

This tension transfers over when LeBron and Dom suddenly find themselves sucked into the Warner Bros.

The central conflict involves middle child Dom (Cedric Joe), who is less interested in following in his dad's sneakers than he is in creating his own video games, an interest that befuddles and disappoints LeBron. A New Legacy is focused not just on solidifying James's on-court bona fides, but also in casting him as a hardcore family man with values. Cue the opening credits scene tracing highlights from James' career on and off the court (including, notably, his response to Fox News' Laura Ingraham telling him to 'shut up and dribble') to bring us into the present day, where LeBron, playing himself, is rich and famous and a loving husband and father of three.Ī few callbacks here and there notwithstanding, that's about where the direct similarities to the Michael Jordan Space Jam end. In a flashback to 1998, a young LeBron James (Stephen Kankole) has a bad day on the court with his basketball team and gets a prescient pep talk from his coach (Wood Harris) about how he could turn out to become a once-in-a-lifetime player.

Lee, Space Jam: A New Legacy opens not unlike its predecessor. And your enjoyment of any of these movies will depend heavily on two factors: your age and your level of obsession with said superstar.ĭirected by Malcolm D. All three films contain an accomplished character actor hamming it up as a villain who wishes to destroy the superstar's power to be superstars. Like Moonwalker, both Space Jams feature Black superstars (first Michael Jordan, now LeBron James) whose legends had already been firmly secured in history prior to their participation in these respective projects. And I mention it here because I couldn't get it out of my head while watching Space Jam: A New Legacy, the bloated sequel to the 1996 feature Space Jam. It included, among many other flights of fancy: a 10-minute retrospective looking back on the highs of his career up to that point, from his breakout with The Jackson 5 through to Bad a segment in which he's chased around a studio lot by rabid fans rendered in Claymation and the film's centerpiece, a cheesy morality tale involving Joe Pesci as a mobster whose evil plan is to get everyone in the world hooked on drugs - starting with Jackson's three adolescent companions (one of whom is a young Sean Lennon) whom the benevolent Jackson must save by turning into a Transformer-like robot-spaceship. LeBron James stars alongside Bugs Bunny in Space Jam: A New Legacy.Īt some point, a pitch was made for the multimedia project that would become Moonwalker, a 90-minute hybrid short film/music video collection serving as Michael Jackson's opulent shrine to himself.

The ultimate spacie