"Looney Tunes: Back in Action"

Bugs and Daffy invade the real Hollywood in this manic farce from director Joe Dante -- but the result is an exhausting mess.

By Charles Taylor

Nov 14, 2003 | Warner Bros. has sent out prints of its new movie "Looney Tunes: Back in Action" with an attached trailer for next year's big holiday family release, a creepy-looking digital version of Chris van Allsburg's picture book "The Polar Express" directed by Robert Zemeckis. The contrast is instructive. Zemeckis and Joe Dante, the director of "Looney Tunes: Back in Action," started making features at roughly the same time. But while Zemeckis has abandoned the crazy comic style of "Used Cars" and "Death Becomes Her" for the uplift of "Forrest Gump" and "Contact," Dante has stayed true to his hyperkinetic smart-alecky movie-mad sensibility.

In pictures like "The Howling," parts of "Gremlins" and the far gentler "Matinee," and especially in the exhilarating "Gremlins 2: The New Batch" and "It's a Good Life," his startling contribution to the omnibus "Twilight Zone: The Movie," Dante has shown a surefire instinct for pop anarchy. Filled with references to old horror and sci-fi movies, rock 'n' roll, comic books, forgotten and revered icons of kitsch culture, Dante's movies zap you between the eyes, making you laugh even as you can't believe what you're seeing; maybe because you can't believe what you're seeing. The sight of a theater full of gremlins tossing popcorn like evil little kids and singing "Heigh Ho, Heigh Ho" along with Disney's Seven Dwarves or, in the sequel, a more highly evolved Gremlin turning into William F. Buckley made me feel like rockets had been attached to my feet and I'd been blasted into the funnysphere. At his best, Dante gives you the sensation that hell is breaking loose on the screen.

That's why the prospect of having him revive Looney Tunes (which, for me, hold a place with Buster Keaton and Preston Sturges in the pantheon of American movie comedy) is enough to get your mouth watering. But "Looney Tunes: Back in Action," written by Larry Doyle, is manic while being only sporadically funny.

Part of the problem is that, except for the best sections of "Who Framed Roger Rabbit," the combination of live action and animation has always felt awkward, an uneasy mingling of two distinct worlds. Dante doesn't solve that problem here. It doesn't help that the familiar characters are seen in three-dimensional versions that trash our memories of their original form. And he hasn't provided opportunities for the human performers (Brendan Fraser, Jenna Elfman, Steve Martin and Heather Locklear among them) to break out into the sort of uninhibited physical comedy that could hold its own against the Looney Tunes repertory company. (In addition to Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck, Yosemite Sam, Elmer Fudd, Wile E. Coyote and Pepe LePew turn up, and characters like Michigan J. Frog and Ralph the Sheepdog pass by in the background.)

The plot has to do with a Warner Bros. executive (Elfman) trying to locate Daffy Duck and woo him back to the studio after she's made the career-ending move of firing him, and a studio security guard (Fraser) on a mission to aid his dad (Timothy Dalton), a movie star who plays a spy and, in real life, really is a spy. This setup allows Dante to make some jibes at the expense of the contemporary movie business (one exec proudly points to a poster for "Lethal Weapon Babies" and calls it "the first movie in the 'Lethal Weapon' series I could take my grandchildren to see"). And there are some recognizable Dante touches. He represents the Brothers Warner with a pair of identical roly-poly twins who are so old-school they still use corded phones. And when the plot takes Fraser and Elfman to Paris, we see a French poster for Jerry Lewis' "Which Way to the Front?"

Best of all is an inspired sequence where Elmer Fudd chases Bugs and Daffy through the Louvre and the trio pops in and out of paintings by Dalí, Munch and Seurat, morphing into surrealist and pointillist versions of themselves. (When Elmer blasts his shotgun in the midst of Seurat's "Sunday in the Park," tiny dots of color fly off the canvas.) It's a scene that gives you the best of Dante and the best of Looney Tunes: the feeling that the entire world has taken on the contours and logic of a cartoon. Kevin McCarthy, a Dante regular, shows up for a crack gag, and another Dante regular, grumbling little Dick Miller, brings his reliably gruff presence.

Next Page: There's a reason why Looney Tunes cartoons were six minutes long. Plus: Alas, Heather Locklear!

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