Don’t you just love it when films from your childhood stand the test of time?
Joe Dante’s “Looney Tunes: Back in Action” (now, thankfully, on Netflix — though we’ll see how long that lasts) was the Looney Tunes movie we got; but was it the one we deserved? It was the edgy kid’s movie we needed, but we turned our backs to it when it was released in 2003. Almost no one went to see it (it bombed commercially), and the stuffy critics didn’t pay attention to it (it failed critically). Most people today haven’t even seen it, much less re-watched it.
By contrast, an inordinate amount of folks have seen the much worse Looney Tunes live action movie “Space Jam” (1996), with its lame-brained scenes of Michael Jordan playing B-ball and Bugs Bunny rapping. “Space Jam” has bizarrely been canonized as a nostalgic darling, whereas “Back in Action” has largely disappeared from the public eye. So it goes.
Nearly a decade later, we can look back to “Back in Action” and marvel at how well it’s aged. Brendan Fraser (“The Mummy”) is a has-been stuntman who teams up with a hard-nosed studio executive (Jenna Elfman) to stop the chairman of the ACME corporation (Steve Martin) from turning all of mankind into monkeys. It’s sounds like a lot, but it really isn’t. The thin plot is just an excuse to go traveling around the world (L.A., Las Vegas, the Nevada Desert, Area 51, Paris, Africa and space) with the Looney Tunes crew (Bugs Bunny & Daffy Duck).
In many ways, “Looney Tunes: Back in Action” is the ultimate commercial oddity. Depending on which way you look at it, it is both an impersonal blockbuster monstrosity or a daringly personal commentary on its own making. It relentlessly shoe-horns in product placements (Walmart, Fresca, Mountain Dew), but codes them in such a way that makes you aware you’re being put-on by Hollywood’s money-grubbing system. Stellar example: Our four hapless heroes come across a big honking Walmart in the middle of the desert. As a choir coos, “Waaaalmaaart,” Bugs asks: “Is it a mirage? Or just product placement?” Later, Jenna Elfman ruefully notes: “The audience expects this. They don’t even notice this kind of thing anymore.” Brendan Fraser raises his eyebrows to the camera. In a quick cut, we hear Bugs leaving the store, happily noting how “it was really nice of Walmart to give [them] all this free Walmart stuff just for saying ‘Walmart’ so many times!” At this point, the obviously belabored self-criticism stops becoming belabored, entering into a weird and ambiguous zone of hyper-self-consciousness.
When I was a kid, I certainly laughed my head off at things which, re-watching it today, seem so obvious and inane. (The “Psycho” send-up is cringeworthy; Steve Martin’s hyperactive performance is, on an unironic level, too much.) But now, a little wisened, I have to admit I chuckle even harder at the things happening in the periphery: the audaciousness, the throat-grabbing references to American pop culture that are shoe-horned but willfully so, the unabashed weirdness. At one point, Brendan Fraser’s character has a conversation with Daffy on his job as a stuntman: “You remember all those ‘Mummy’ movies? I’m in ’em more than Brendan Fraser is!” Earlier, Porky Pig and Speedy Gonzalez are having a chit-chat in a café:
Porky: Eh, f-first they tell me to lose the st-st-a-stutter. Now they tell me I’m not funny. (sigh) It’s a pain in the butt, being a-pol-pl-a-p-politically correct.
Speedy: You’re telling me…
How do we even describe the comedy style of “Back in Action”? It’s funny, but not in a fun, unforced way. It’s smart, but still stupid enough to please studio heads. The answer: It is ZANY. This comedic aesthetic is one of the most difficult to understand (though scholars like Sianne Ngai have explained it extremely well). It gets its kicks off of having the air (though not the actual quality) of being half-assed, huffing and puffing and stuttering with an overworked, overstressed zeal. The zany product pervades every aspect of our lives, in myriad ways — in Richard Lester’s and Jerry Lewis’s movies, in “I Love Lucy” and “Too Many Cooks,” in the Adult Swim stoner comedy and Punch and Judy. The artists behind the zany revel in splits and rifts. They desperately try to jam as many jokes into a 10-second stretch of film as they possibly can. It doesn’t matter if the material they’re working with is naturally funny. The very act of jamming and juxtaposing makes us laugh, regardless.
The beauty of “Back in Action” doesn’t just lie with the toonish characters: it’s with the idiotic human characters (Steve Martin’s unconvincing villain, Elfman and Fraser’s bland stock heroes) who counterpoint the genuinely soulful toons very well. We’re made aware of the artifice of the movie, and it’s that much richer because of it. As a result, it is perversely less sentimental than “Roger Rabbit” (at the expense of that movie’s good human performance form Bob Hoskins) and less gimmicky than “Space Jam” (at the expense of…Lola Bunny? Michael Jordan? Please.).
Dante (who also made “Gremlins” and “Small Soldiers”) took on a thankless job by directing this movie. But like the makers of “National Treasure,” he ended up with an accidental winner on his hands. By channeling the well-oiled bombast of his satiric predesceser Frank Tashlin (the director of such comic tour-de-forces as “The Girl Can’t Help It”, “Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?”, and “Son of Paleface”), Dante ensures his satire is more than the sum of its blathering, depressing parts.
Contact Carlos Valladares at [email protected].