Review: 'Space Jam: A New Legacy' is a cynical cash grab, putting brand awareness ahead of doing anything funny

It’s when LeBron James, basketball icon, becomes a cartoon and hits the ground like Wile E. Coyote that “Space Jam: A New Legacy” reveals what kind of movie it intends to be.

Up to that point — in this re-imagining of the 1996 animated/live-action hybrid that paired that era’s NBA superstar, Michael Jordan, with Bugs Bunny — the movie sets us up for a fast-moving, visually chaotic but narratively predictable story about LeBron and his son, Dom (Cedric Joe), getting sucked into the “ServerVerse” at the Warner Bros. studios. This computer world is run by the villain, a program called Al G. Rhythm (Don Cheadle, giving his all in a thankless part), who tells LeBron he can get his son back if he can recruit a basketball team from all the Warner Bros. intellectual property at hand, and defeat Al G.’s team in a match.

So Al G. sends LeBron to Tune World — passing the Harry Potter world, the “Game of Thrones” world and “The Matrix” world on the way — and is transformed, briefly, into a 2-D cartoon. He lands on Tune World with a familiar Looney Tunes thud, and when the dust clears, LeBron is climbing out of the hole he created with his impact.

OK, here’s where the movie reveals itself: The hole is shaped like the Nike swoosh.

With that humorless, corporate-driven attempt at a visual gag, “Space Jam: A New Legacy” shows itself not as entertainment, but as a cash grab — and Warner Bros., when it’s not hyping its own trademarks, lets the sneaker company LeBron represents have a turn at the money spigot.

Director Malcolm D. Lee (“Girls Trip,” “Night School”) and the film’s six credited screenwriters try to muster up the bare bones of a plot, involving LeBron’s tough-love efforts to get Dom to practice his basketball skills — while Dom tries to convince his dad that his real passion is designing video games. The main drama centers on the Big Game between the Tune Squad and the Goon Squad, coached by Al G., who works overtime to spoil Dom and make the kid turn against his dad.

The movie introduces LeBron to the Looney Tunes characters by re-enacting classic bits from the old cartoons, such as the classic “Rabbit season!”/“Duck season!” posters that summon Bugs — putting nostalgic familiarity in the place of something genuinely clever. Other characters are found among other WB properties, with Yosemite Sam playing the piano in “Casablanca,” Speedy Gonzales performing the bullet-time moves from “The Matrix,” and so on. The only one of these that actually pays off is a smartly animated sequence in which Lola Bunny (voiced by Zendaya) completes her Amazon training in a “Wonder Woman” comic book.

The attempts at humor are either labored sight gags referencing movies, rap lyrics, and random memes. It’s one thing that six writers couldn’t come up with something funny for humans, even funny humans like Sarah Silverman and Lil Rey Howery, is sad. To put the Looney Tunes characters on the screen without anything funny to say is downright criminal.

In the end, “Space Jam: A New Legacy” isn’t here to reboot the Looney Tunes franchise; those characters are old hat in the current entertainment-industrial complex. This is an audiovisual presentation at the Warner Bros. shareholders’ meeting, a big-screen catalog of corporate-owned brands — both family friendly and, like “The Matrix” and “Game of Thrones,” definitely not — to remind the suits what titles could be making them money.

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‘Space Jam: A New Legacy’

★1/2

Opens Friday, July 16, in theaters and on HBO Max. Rated PG for some cartoon violence and some language. Running time: 115 minutes.

Review: 'The Loneliest Whale' is a heartfelt, if narratively thin, pursuit for answers to an oceanic mystery

There must be no feeling worse to a documentary filmmaker than getting your footage together, after years of filming, and realizing there’s not enough story there — which makes director Joshua Zeman’s accomplishment in “The Loneliest Whale: The Search for 52” kind of remarkable, because he squeezes out a good yarn in spite of a thin story line.

Zeman’s search begins with a decades-long mystery in the field of oceanography. It involves the songs of whales, and one particular whale who emits a specific frequency — 52 hertz — that’s higher than the sounds made by blue whales or fin whales. (It’s far lower than the whale songs most familiar to humans, those of humpback whales.) 

It was theorized, based on recordings made by a secret U.S. Navy underwater program, that there was only one whale who made this 52-hertz sound, which presumably meant no other whale could understand the song. Thus the so-called “52-hertz whale,” or 52 for short, was referred to in reports as “the world’s loneliest whale.”

Zeman starts by talking to the resident experts in oceanography, particularly those who have studied whale songs and the mystery of 52. He then goes one better, taking his meager production budget — raised through a Kickstarter campaign, and such benefactors as actors Leonardo DiCaprio and Adrian Grenier (who are among the producers) — for a one-week expedition off the California coast, where many of these same experts combine their talents to try to figure out where 52 might be, if he/she is still alive at all.

Through the expedition, Zeman explores the many challenges faced by whales in the open ocean. One of the biggest is commercial shipping, because the giant freighters that carry goods here and there produce tons of noise that drown out the whales’ sounds, thus cutting them off from communicating with each other.

The adventure of the expedition isn’t as exciting as one might think, since much of it involves pleasant young scientists and grizzled old scientists staring intently at computer monitors. It also doesn’t fill a lot of screen time — leaving Zeman to fill with narrative side trips into the history of whaling and how a recording of humpback whales became a best-selling album that jumpstarted the environmental movement. He even lets comedian/musician Kate Micucci (from Garfunkel & Oates) perform a funny little ditty about the loneliest whale, which she names “Doreen” mostly because it’s an easy name to rhyme.

Zeman is an engaging enough narrator, and his earnest pursuit of answers to this longstanding aquatic mystery allows the viewer to forgive the occasional dull patch. Like any fishing trip, “The Loneliest Whale” is more about the pleasant company of one’s companions than on whether you catch anything.

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‘The Loneliest Whale: The Search for 52’

★★★

Opens Friday, July 9, at Megaplex Theaters at The District (South Jordan); available on demand starting July 16. Rated PG for some unsettling whaling images, language and brief smoking. Running time: 97 minutes.

Review: 'Summer of Soul' presents the concert event, and historical document, we need now — more than 50 years after it happened.

With a historian’s eye, a musician’s ear and an activist’s heart, Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson has fashioned an important document of a vital era with “Summer of Soul (… Or When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised).”

It’s also a great music to dance in the aisles on the way to demanding social change that’s been denied long before 1969, when this amazing story takes place.

Here’s the scene: It’s Harlem, in the summer of 1969, in the weeks before the music festival known as Woodstock made headlines upstate a hundred miles. The Harlem Culture Festival took place over six weekends, with concerts in Mt. Morris Park in Harlem — with a line-up of some of the best talent Black America had to offer.

Much of it was filmed for posterity — and that footage sat untouched in a basement, until Thompson started working on this movie.

It’s an embarrassment of riches that Thompson has to work with, and like the bandleader he is (of The Roots), he starts by assembling a dream playlist. Start with Stevie Wonder, then move on to some of the old reliables, like B.B. King and Herbie Mann, and slide into some of the young hitmakers of the day, like The 5th Dimension and Gladys Knight & The Pips. Include a healthy dose of gospel, topped by the legend Mahalia Jackson handing off to a young Mavis Staples. Move into some Motown, and then Sly and the Family Stone. Don’t forget some Puerto Rican and Afro-Cuban acts, a song by South Africa’s Hugh Masekela, and then give the stage to Nina Simone. Finish with encores by Wonder and Sly.

If all Thompson did was play the hits, that would be enough. But Thompson adds interviews from participants and attendees that bring the moments alive — commenting on what it felt like to be there, and even smelled like (“chicken and Afro Sheen,” as one concertgoer put it). The interviews also set the context for the shows, just over a year after Marrtin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, as America sent a disproportionate number of Black men to Vietnam while flying two white military pilots to the moon.

There are some gems in the new interview footage — like seeing Marilyn McCoo and Billy Davis Jr. watching themselves in The 5th Dimension, or Lin-Manuel Miranda and his father, Luis, explaining the crossover of Latin and Caribbean sounds into soul and R&B. And the historical side never overwhelms the musical side, but also never feels like an afterthought.

By blending the history with the music so gracefully, Thompson has created a document of a 1969 event that feels as alive as if it happened last year. Put “Summer of Soul” on a double-bill with “Woodstock,” and see which one is the nostalgia trip and which one is relevant to what’s happening now.

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’Summer of Soul (… Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised)’

★★★★

Opens Friday, July 2, in theaters, and streaming on Hulu. Rated PG-13 for some disturbing images, smoking and brief drug material. Running time: 117 minutes.

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This review originally ran on this site on January 29, 2021, when the movie premiered at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival.

Review: 'The Boss Baby: Family Business' is a bland sequel that will tax most children's attention spans

It would be great to say that “The Boss Baby: Family Business” is a comedy masterpiece, or that it’s a steaming pile of garbage, or something more nuanced or expressive somewhere in between — but it’s none of those things.

No, this sequel to DreamWorks’ 2017 animated tale of a baby who’s really an undercover spy for a secret organization run by babies is even less than meets the eye. It’s a lackluster Hollywood “product,” with no more flavor or excitement than a spoonful of strained peas.

If you remember the 2017 “The Boss Baby,” it was for Alec Baldwin providing the voice of Ted, newly born little brother to 7-year-old Tim, who discovers that his baby brother is a latte-sipping executive type — sent by his company, BabyCorp, to learn what an evil rival corporation is doing.

The new movie starts years after the last movie, with Tim (now voiced by James Marsden) and Ted (still voiced by Baldwin) as estranged adults. Tim is a family man, with a wife, Carol (voiced by Eva Longoria), and overachieving daughter, Tabitha (voiced by Ariana Greenblatt). Ted is single, because who has time for family when you’re a super-successful CEO with a private helicopter. Tabitha idolizes Ted, while telling her own father that she’s too grown-up for his bedtime stories and other parental perks.

Who’s going to save this fractured family? That would be Tabitha’s new baby sister, Tina (voiced by Amy Sedaris) — who, like her Uncle Ted, is a BabyCorp agent. Tina is on a mission to uncover the nefarious plans of Dr. Irwin Armstrong (voiced by Jeff Goldblum), founder of the Acorn Academy charter schools, including the one whose rigorous academic discipline could, Tina says, destroy childhood forever.

Using a BabyCorp formula that reverts Tim and Ted to their ages in the first film, the brothers go undercover in Armstrong’s school — and discover a secret that could alter the world. Meanwhile, Tim in his kid form, also learns why Tabitha has become a raging stress ball who apparently forgot the importance of having fun.

Director Tom McGrath is an old hand at DreamWorks Animation — he directed “Megamind,” the first “Boss Baby,” and three “Madagascar” movies, and he voices Skipper in “The Penguins of Madagascar” — and there’s a rote familiarity in how he tackles what could be an off-the-wall story. While McGrath does apply a few colorful touches, mostly in Tim’s Thurber-esque flights of imagination while doing family chores, the result here is too bland to be worth sampling.

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‘The Boss Baby: Family Business’

★★

Opens Friday, July 2, in theaters, and streaming on Peacock (at a premium price). Rated PG for rude humor, mild language and some action. Running time: 107 minutes.

Review: 'The Forever Purge' aims for red-meat catharsis, and commentary about xenophobia on the border — but it feels a little too real to be entertaining

Five movies into “The Purge” franchise, with “The Forever Purge,” and what started as a tight little thriller about mob violence and class warfare has morphed into something else: A blood-drenched predictor of things to come.

It’s a stretch to call James DeMonaco — who has written all five screenplays in the series, and directed the first three — an oracle. It requires no clairvoyance, just cynicism and a cursory knowledge of American history, to guess that things can go bad when angry people with guns get a chance to vent their frustrations. If anything, the lurid machinations in “The Forever Purge” feel a bit dated next to what we watched on the news on January 6th.

In the timeline of the series, the Purge — the annual 12-hour night of unrestrained violence, where all crime including murder is legal (though, it’s noted, government officials above a certain level are exempted) — has returned. So has the right-wing political force that spawned it, the New Founding Fathers of America.

So in a Texas town near the Mexican border, various folks get ready to hunker down and ride out the brutality. The rich Tucker family — the patriarch Caleb (Will Patton), daughter Harper (Leven Rambin), son Dylan (Josh Lucas), and Dylan’s pregnant wife, Cassie (Cassidy Freeman) — closes the iron door and window guards of their sprawling house. Meanwhile, Juan (Tenoch Huerta) and T.T. (Alejandro Edda), undocumented ranch hands who work for the Tuckers, hop on a bus that takes them, along with Juan’s wife, Adela (Ana de la Reguera), to a bunker attached to a nearby church.

The 12 hours pass, and everyone emerges from their hiding spots ready to clean up the mess and start a new day. Soon, though, they find that some people aren’t ready to stop the Purge. Fueled by demagogic leaders, social media, a TV network whose name is never overtly mentioned, and their home arsenals, these folks declare the Purge will go on “ever after” — targeting both the super-rich and immigrants.

After some close calls, including Adela getting caught in a contraption that looks like something from a “Saw” yard sale, the Tuckers and their Mexican acquaintances have to join forces to survive the Ever After factions that have overrun many parts of the nation. Their goal becomes survival, and getting to the Mexican border, which — in an ironic twist that’s as subtle as everything else in DeMonaco’s bruising script — is letting in refugees trying to escape the new Purge.

Mexican-born director Everardo Valerio Gout knows his job is to lay the action and violence on with a trowel, and he throws the red meat to the audience with both fists. He throws every action trope into the mix, including some chase scenes that feel cribbed from “Mad Max,” but without the same visceral thrill.

Whatever quick-hit emotional catharsis Gout and DeMonaco conspire to create through the bloody action, as the innocent Juan and blowhard Dylan must learn to kill, the high is brief and unsustainable. It’s hard to watch a fictional dystopia that looks too much like a freshly filmed documentary.  

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‘The Forever Purge’

★★

Opens Friday, July 2, in theaters. Rated R for strong bloody violence, and language throughout. Running time: 104 minutes.

Review: 'Zola' turns an epic Twitter thread into a sharply rendered, adults-only story of a stripper caught up in some bad business

A rapid-fire comedy not for the prudish, director Janicza Bravo’s “Zola” finds caustic humor in what many consider to be the craziest story ever told on Twitter.

In 2015, in 144 tweets, A’ziah “Zola” King told of the time she and a “friend” of hers, Stefani, took time off from their work at a strip club to take a weekend trip to Florida — where, as is all too common for Florida, all kinds of crap went down.

As told here, Zola (Taylour Paige, recently seen in “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom”) is a sensible young woman who knows working as a stripper pays better than waitressing — but she has limits, like not doing private shows and not prostituting herself. If only Zola had known, before Stefani (Riley Keough) talked her into going to Florida to dance at some clubs for some fast money, that Stefani did not work under such limitations.

Zola, Stefani, her boyfriend Derek (Nicholas Brand), and a guy (Colman Domingo) whose name Zola would not hear for the first 48 hours of their trip, all pile into an SUV and drive to the Tampa area. While Derek sits at a crappy hotel, the nameless guy takes Zola and Stefani to a nicer hotel — which is when Zola learns that the guy is Stefani’s pimp, and that the guy expects Stefani and Zola to make some money for him. (These scenes have some explicit male nudity, and are not for the squeamish.)

Bravo — who brought the discomfort-centered comedy “Lemon” to Sundance in 2017 — and her co-writer, Jeremy O. Harris, spin Zola’s yarn with all the “can you believe this?” immediacy of a good Twitter thread. (The regular tweet sound effects make it feel like the audience is following along to King’s original posts.) Much of Bravo’s humor comes from the larger-than-life characters, and the way the cast captures them — from Domingo’s cold-blooded thug to Brand’s dim bulb hick, and especially Keough’s trailer-trash inflections.

Holding it all together is Paige, who does more with a side-eye glance than most actors do with a sonnet. It’s through Paige’s Zola that we witness the increasingly strange antics, and she takes us through the fire and out with charm and wit. 

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‘Zola’

★★★

Opens Wednesday, June 30, in theaters. Rated R for strong sexual content and language throughout, graphic nudity, and violence including a sexual assault. Running time: 86 minutes.

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This review originally ran on this site on January 24, 2020, when the movie premiered at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival.

Review: 'Black Widow' delivers gritty action, and gives Scarlett Johansson a perfect swan song to her Marvel character

Scarlett Johansson finally gets a chance to be front-and-center in a Marvel movie in “Black Widow,” and she makes the most of the opportunity — bringing genuine emotion that adds some heft to the superhero spectacle.

“Black Widow” is the 23rd movie in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but don’t necessarily expect everything to go as you assume it will. This is also the first in the so-called “phase four” that follows the post-Tony Stark era, and the first to hit theaters in two years (thanks, COVID!). It’s also the third movie to have a female superhero in the title (after “Ant-Man and The Wasp” and “Captain Marvel”), the second to give that female superhero sole billing, and the first to have a solo female director — Australian filmmaker Cate Shortland (“Lore,” “Berlin Syndrome”) — in charge. 

Shortland and screenwriter Eric Pearson (“Thor: Ragnarok,” “Godzilla vs. Kong”) — with story credit to Jac Schaeffer (show-runner for “WandaVision”) and Ned Benson — are hemmed into a precise window in the life of Johansson’s character, super-spy and now Avenger Natasha Romanoff. That time is late 2016, right after the events of “Captain America: Civil War,” when the Avengers splintered and sent Natasha on the run — and shortly before what happened in “Avengers: Infinity War” and “Avengers: Endgame,” of which Natasha didn’t survive to see the outcome.

First, though, a pre-credits flashback to 1995 Ohio, where sisters Natasha (Ever Anderson) and Yelena (Violet McGraw) live a happy suburban life with their parents, Melina (Rachel Weisz) and Alexei (David Harbour) — but, we soon learn, it’s all an elaborate cover for Melina and Alexei’s work as Russian spies, answering to the nasty Gen. Dreykov (Ray Winstone).

In 2016, Natasha is dodging Gen. Ross (William Hurt, in it for a minute) and the enforcers of the Sokovia Accords, hiding out in Norway. But something else is hunting her: A hyper-efficient armored assassin known as the Task Master. Natasha soon figures out the Task Master isn’t after her, but something in her SUV: A bundle of vials that contain a clue to who sent them — her “sister,” Yelena.

Yelena, played as an adult by Florence Pugh, is what Natasha used to be: A Black Widow, a super-assassin trained by Dreykov to kill on command. Unlike Natasha, who was trained through psychological conditioning, Yelena is controlled via chemicals — and the vials are a gas that breaks Dreykov’s control over the Widows. Yelena needs Natasha’s help to get to Dreykov, so she lures Natasha to the one place she doesn’t want to go: Budapest. (The city is referenced in the first “Avengers” movie and “Captain America: The Winter Soldier,” and now we get to find out why.)

Eventually, we get a “family” reunion involving Natasha and Yelena finding their fake parents: Alexei, a super-soldier once called the Red Guardian (think Cap, but all in red), and Melina, who helped Dreykov create his most powerful weapons, an army of Widows.

Shortland adds a ground-level realism to the hand-to-hand battles, more street fight than kung-fu ballet. This lets us get up close with Johansson and Pugh, who both revel in adding a layer of expression to the choreographed combat. That grittiness extends to the CGI-aided finale, a battle through a sky of falling debris that feels like an attempt to outdo the finale of “Winter Soldier.”

The movie delivers some good humor in the byplay among Pugh, Weisz and Harbour, the fake family who’s more real that anyone is willing to admit. Best of all is Johanssen, who finally gets to show Natasha as more than a cat-suited sexpot or the Avengers’ dour event coordinator. If this is Johansson’s final bow as Black Widow — and it would take some serious retcon work to avoid that — she gets to go out on top, showing Natasha’s battered, resilient heart as she finally earns some redemption for her past sins.

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‘Black Widow’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, July 9, in theaters everywhere, and streaming (for a fee) on Disney+ Premier. Rated PG-13 for for intense sequences of violence/action, some language and thematic material. Running time: 133 minutes.

Review: 'Werewolves Within' is a crafty satirical comedy wrapped in a horror movie's skins

The horror comedy “Werewolves Within” is a slow-burn movie whose satirical laughs and gory action both enter the picture slowly but build up toward a wickedly sharp ending.

Finn (Sam Richardson) is the newly arrived lawman in the small town of Beaverfield, Vermont. He’s not your stereotypical tough-guy law enforcer, though. As he’s driving into town, he’s listening to assertiveness-training tapes and leaving clingy voice mail messages to the girlfriend he’s not quite accepted has broken up with him.

Sam’s quirks allow him to fit right into Beaverfield, according to the first person he meets there: Cicely (Milana Vayntrub), the town’s perky letter carrier. Cicely introduces Sam to the odd cast of characters in town — who include Devon (Cheyenne Jackson), a tech millionaire from the city, and his yoga-instructor boyfriend, Joaquim (Harvey Guillén); trash-mouthed mechanic Gwen (Sarah Burns) and her stoner boyfriend, Marcus (George Basil); and craft-obsessed Trisha (Michaela Watkins) and her husband Pete (Michael Chernus), a walking sexual-harassment lawsuit; people-pleasing innkeeper Jeanine (Catherine Curtin); and anti-government mountain man Emerson Flint (Glenn Fleshler).

Finn arrives in the middle of a town dispute, involving the plans of developer Sam Parker (Wayne Duvall) to build a natural-gas pipeline through town. Some townsfolk like the idea, because it means they’ll get some money. Others prefer to listen to Dr. Ellis (Rebecca Henderson), a scientist and environmentalist who’s staying in Jeanine’s inn while she fights Sam’s proposal.

As if tensions aren’t running high already, Finn discovers that someone or something has ripped through metal to tear apart all the generators in town — and has killed and partially eaten Jeanine’s husband, Dave. Meanwhile, a storm has cut power lines and blocked the only road into town, so Finn must deal with a bunch of locals who are scared, suspicious and packing heat.

“Werewolves Within” is loosely based on a 2016 VR video game, where players must figure out which of them is a werewolf in disguise. It’s sort of a mix of the role-playing video game “Among Us” and John Carpenter’s “The Thing.”

What director Josh Ruben (who also directed last year’s Sundance fright-filled comedy “Scare Me”) and first-time screenwriter Mishna Wolff (who’s known for her 2009 memoir “I’m Down”) bring to the proceedings is a dry sense of humor. It takes a little while to kick in, but there’s some sly commentary threaded through the jokes that touches on small-town paranoia, gun culture, environmental activism, #MeToo sexism and xenophobia — all lightly applied, never feeling preachy.

It helps that the ensemble cast is loaded with people — particularly Richardson (“Veep”), Curtin (“Stranger Things”) and Watkins (“Brittany Runs a Marathon”) — tuned into that satirical wavelength. The MVP is Vayntrub, known to most people as Lily, the AT&T store clerk, who channels that gal-next-door vibe into Cecily’s happily skewed take on Beaverfield’s oddballs. As the movie gets deeper into its who-can-you-trust? creepiness, Vayntrub’s comic skills come out to their fullest.

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‘Werewolves Within’

★★★

Opens Friday, June 25, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for some bloody violence, sexual references and language throughout. Running time: 97 minutes.