"LOONEY TUNES: BACK IN ACTION"

2003

Starring

Brendan Fraser

Jenna Elfman

Steve Martin

Timothy Dalton

with Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck

Directed by Joe Dante

88 minutes

A modern film? An American modern film? Has the Bus lost his senses? He’s usually so charmingly cinematically-xenophobic. However, onwards and upwards.

A confession coming up: when I was a wee scamp, I never much cared for the Looney Tunes. Cartoon Network, back when it used to show quality children’s cartoons (about ten years ago), would occasionally have Looney Tunes marathons, devoting entire days to the 6 minute exploits of Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Tweety Pie and the rest. I’d watch them sometimes, and I did like them, honest, but they never really hooked me at all – they are very formulaic cartoons, after all, usually consisting of two characters trying to outwit each other in such a way that the opponent gets blown up / shot out of a cannon / thrown out of the twenty-ninth floor of a skyscraper etc. But back then, I usually turned to the stuff served up from the vaults of the Hanna-Barbera company – Fred Flintstone, George Jetson, Dick Dastardly and so forth. I’m not entirely sure why I made the distinction, but I just found them to be somehow more wholesome than the "wacky" characters from Warner Brothers. The exceptions to the rule were Wile. E. Coyote and the Roadrunner, a series of cartoons which I judged to be a cut above the rest of the general Looney Tunes fare, despite arguably being even more samey than any other cartoons. However, for me the fun was in trying to work out exactly how Wile. E’s latest invention (imported from the ACME corporation, of course) was going to fail in the three seconds afforded to me before it did. A brain sharpening exercise, if you will. It made me what I am today. Which means that Wile. E. Coyote and the Roadrunner have a lot to answer for.

But I digress (frequently). As I grew up I left behind most of the cartoons in favour of "Doctor Who", which, as we all know, is the best television series in the world (isn’t it?). Watching Tom Baker blowing up the Zygons was more fulfilling than being a spectator to Bugs Bunny blowing up Yosemite Sam. Possibly because the Doctor’s jokes were better, I don’t know. "Would you like a jelly baby?" is funnier than "What’s up Doc?" after all.

A while ago, I suddenly felt a strong sense of nostalgia for all the slices of televisual mayhem that I’d left behind. The Hanna-Barbera cartoons (several of which I revisited for a series of vaguely satirical articles), the Supermarionation works of Gerry Anderson, and, yes, the Looney Tunes. For the record, the Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers have yet to gain such a resurgence of interest. Probably because I only liked that program for the monsters, and "Doctor Who" had more of them. The Daleks v. some bloke in a bumblebee costume, hissing "Feel my sting, Power Dweebs!" Not much of a contest, really. Give me an extermination any day. Not literally, of course. But anyhow, a while ago I caught up with some of the Looney Tunes cartoons as they were rerun on, yes, a marathon weekend. And, y’know, I was entertained. I recognised lots of things that I hadn’t noticed before, such as the fact that Foghorn Leghorn (the big chicken with the Kentucky accent – "Come over, I say, come over here, boy!") was hilarious, and Bugs Bunny was nowhere near as irritating as I used to think he was. Daffy Duck’s pessimism and tongue-twisting use of vocabulary (all of which had completely gone over my six-year-old head) struck me as being quite witty in varied amounts, and I just had to applaud the sheer number of ways that the makers could contrive to get Bugs to make Yosemite Sam fall off that diving board (you know what I’m talking about).

All of which brings me back to this film. Recently I bought four Looney Tunes DVD volumes, which I’m still making my way through, for about £6 each, and enjoyed the vast majority of the contents. Having a gander at what else I could find, I stumbled across this very film, which I had forgotten had ever been made, despite it being on our cinema screens less than two years ago. If memory serves, it didn’t really arrive with much fanfare. Perhaps the makers were feeling nervous about the enterprise after the panning directed at an earlier attempt to bring the Looney Tunes into the modern world: 1996’s "Space Jam" (that one with Michael Jordan in it), a film which, whilst serving as an amiable enough way to pass the time, was ultimately mindless, attempting to crow-bar favourite cartoon stars in a setting in which they did not really belong. An intergalactic basketball game? Were they insane? "Space Jam" is still being kicked about by Looney Tunes fans, still incensed that Daffy Duck actually said "We’re screwed," in a kids film. Nevertheless, seven years later "Looney Tunes: Back in Action" hit the cinema screens.

It bombed. According to my ever-reliable fountain of movie trivia, IMDB, it made the biggest loss in 2003, and ended up being (as of early 2004) the "fourth biggest loss of all time". Quite why this is, I don’t know. Theories to do with poor marketing have been proposed – "The trailer was rubbish so nobody wanted to go," and so forth. Maybe people still shuddered at the memory of "Space Jam", and feared a return to that sorry state of filmic affairs. They had cause to worry – "Back in Action" was originally to be made as "Spy Jam", starring Jackie Chan as the next big star ready to utterly embarrass himself by being upstaged by a duck.

Myself? I loved this film. I finished watching it two hours ago, and I’m grinning like an idiot. It truly is a wonderful little masterpiece. I’ll even forgive the single one flatulence joke in it (my my, what a concession – you won’t be seeing its like from me again).

They’ve got it right this time. This time, the chaps and chappettes behind it all have sat down and had a good think about it, and the question posed is not "What would a modern world mean to the Looney Tunes?", which created "Space Jam", but "What do the Looney Tunes mean to a modern world?" And further along these lines, "What would the Looney Tunes do in a modern world?" The answer is refreshingly simple – exactly the same as they’ve always been doing for the past sixty or so years. Running around, getting blown up, defying the laws of physics, and mocking every convention you could bring yourself to champion.

It’s surprising how well the Looney Tunes translate to the digital world. There’s a lot of in-jokes and nods to the past, as well as quite a few made about the movies of today (example: Bugs Bunny briefly goes fishing, and exclaims "Hey! I found Nemo!"). It’s the sort of film that gets labelled as "post-modern" by people who don’t actually know what the term means, including me. But whatever else you may call it, at its heart it’s very very funny. Which is what counts, after all. In some ways, this surprised me – there’s a lot of "We’re just characters in a movie," type of remarks made throughout, the sort of "ironic" smirks that usually bore me to tears. However, in the confines of a Looney Tunes film, they feel so right. After all, yonks ago Daffy starred in a short which was precisely about the fact that he was a cartoon character, featuring him lambasting the artist for giving him incorrect scenery and costumes ("Duck Amock", which has gone on to become a cartoon classic). Here, Daffy triumphantly exclaims "You never got me to co-star in your movie!", only to realise that he’s done just that for the past eighty minutes. There’s precious little difference, and in both cases it’s top notch fun.

Brendan Fraser stars as Drake, a security guard / failing stuntman, who actually gets the line "You remember ‘The Mummy’? I was in that more than Brendan Fraser was!", a joke that’s far funnier here than it was in 2005’s "Ocean’s Twelve", in which an actress plays a character who pretends to be the actress who’s playing her for the sake of being able to appear with an actor playing himself (how do I know all this? Ha, that’ll leave you wondering for a while…). Drake’s father, an actor who starred in spy films but is in reality a real bona-fide spy (and, what’s more, is played by Timothy Dalton, who’s actually quite superb), has been kidnapped, and Drake sets off to find him, and to locate the mysterious diamond known as the Blue Monkey, all the while being accompanied by that despicable destitute Daffy Duck. Meanwhile, Kate Houghton (played by Jenna Elfman), a Warner Brothers executive, has been given the task of rehiring said duck, whom she’s only just fired for not being funny enough. Off she goes, aided on her quest by the cool, calm and collected Bugs Bunny, who gets his banjo thrown out of the car, if you please. Meanwhile, the head of ACME, Steve Martin, is keeping his eyes on both entourages, hoping to capture the Blue Monkey for his own diabolical ends. Our band of heroes find themselves on the run from the likes of Yosemite Sam, Wile. E. Coyote and Elmer Fudd, all the time attempting to get nearer and nearer to the diamond.

Despite the fact that the cartoon characters are really the stars of the film, the human cast members do pretty well for themselves too. Brendan Fraser and Jenna Elfman fulfil their plot functions admirably, as the audience’s connection to the off-the-wall antics of their animated partners. Heather Locklear appears to turn up the heat a bit as Dusty Tails, secret agent / erotic dancer (every PG certificate film needs one). As the villain, Steve Martin has been the source of some dispute, his over-the-top and slightly stilted performance being oft derided as being… over-the-top and slightly stilted. However, I thought he was fine, and managed to be quite amusing to boot, and, in any case, he’s hardly in it anyway. And Timothy Dalton, as already mentioned, is marvellous, playing his part wonderfully straight.

As for the animated hoards, they’re all here, from the star material of Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck, to the fondly remembered yet virtually unseen characters of Beaky Buzzard, the cartoon Peter Lorre, and the dancing green frog in the top hat ("Hello my baby!…"). The more you know your Looney Tunes, the more fun the film ends up being, though it’s fair to say that you’ll probably recognise most of the characters who pop up throughout the duration. Most of them, such as the Roadrunner, Foghorn Leghorn, Sylvester & Tweety, Granny etc. are given mere cameos, though a few get slightly more expanded parts, mainly those that play as Steve Martin’s mercenaries, which include, adding to the names mentioned a few paragraphs above, the Tasmanian Devil and, my personal favourite character, Marvin the Martian, who is joyfully given a part in the final battle for control of the diamond. "Oh, a mission! I’m all a-tingle!"

The humour occasionally derives its laughs from the standard falling anvil / "Let me have it!" / lighting-a-match-in-a-room-of-explosives roster of cartoon gags, though these instances are used sparingly and so remain amusing. However, there is a lot of genuine wit, and I found myself laughing on average of once every ten seconds. And so we get Bugs and Daffy in space asking for directions, so that Marvin opens the window of his rocket and gets sucked into space, or the absolutely gobsmackingly fantastic sequence where Elmer Fudd chases Bugs and Daffy through various paintings at the Louvre. There’s some poking fun of certain cartoon tricks, such as Bugs making his way around the world via flipping the cinema screen as if it were the page of a book. Then there’s Porky Pig ruminating on how political correctness has destroyed his act, the countless references to other films ("Psycho", "Star Wars", "Them!" …), and cameos by characters from the likes of Scooby Do and Robbie the robot from "Lost in Space". It even has the bloody Daleks, for crying out loud. And it makes you laugh when you consider that they couldn’t even get the proper Dalek voices for an official Doctor Who film in 1996, but that they can turn up in person in a Looney Tunes movie, sounding just as if they’d rolled out of the Peter Cushing escapades. "Exterminate them!"

Time to bring my ramblings to a close, methinks. If you have any affection for the Looney Tunes, this film is for you. A lot of love has been put into this feature, and it shows. It’s witty, it’s spectacular, and at eighty minutes (not including the closing credits) it doesn’t outstay its welcome. One of the most consistently enjoyable films I’ve seen in a while now.

Oh, and the back of the DVD mentions the "Acne corporation". Twice. Doesn’t it make you weep?

Score out of Ten