"Looney Tunes: Back in Action"

There's a reason, though, why Looney Tunes cartoons were six minutes long. Stretched out over an hour and a half, they're wearying. It may be that Dante doesn't take advantage of the full panoply of insanity available to him. But I'm betting that Warner Bros., wanting to take advantage of the holiday family movie market, tamped him down. That's ironic for a movie that spends so much time razzing its corporate sponsors. "Looney Tunes: Back in Action" opens with a wham-bam barrage of Daffy Duck being blasted and deformed by Elmer Fudd's shotgun again and again. We then get a studio exec talking about how you can't make these jokes anymore. Later, a cartoon villain hesitates to throw a stick of dynamite. "It will send the wrong message to children," he frets. These are Dante's slams at the persnickety parents and "experts" who claim that cartoons glorify violence (probably the same sorts of creeps who want to keep "Huckleberry Finn" out of schools).

But if you're making a movie about how Looney Tunes represented the id that has been snuffed out of American moviemaking by corporate blandness and political correctness, you can't hold back, and you probably can't do it in a movie costing millions of dollars and aimed at a family audience. When the plot moves to Africa, I was waiting for Dante to do something really politically incorrect, something that would parody the ludicrous movie traditions of what life was like in the jungle. He tosses off one great gag -- Tweety Pie seeing a flock of native Tweetys and, feeling his roots, donning kente cloth to proclaim "Cwy Fweedom!" -- but not the full-blown nuttiness you long for.

The humans in the movie are little more than guest stars. Timothy Dalton as an actor who's a real-life James Bond might have been a great way to parody the grim dullness he brought to his two turns as Bond, but nothing is done with the idea. Brendan Fraser, who combines sweetness with unpredictability in a way that's unique to him, showed more of a cartoon spirit in "Monkeybone," and it's just perverse that his big moment of physical derring-do occurs off-screen.

Steve Martin, as the head of the evil conglomerate Acme, who has a plan to turn humans into monkeys, looks great with a nerd's center-parted hairdo, big round glasses, and floodwater pants, but never gets to cut loose. It's fun at first to see Jenna Elfman as a studio ballbuster; everything that's unconvincing about her spacey sweetness melts away. But as the colleague seeing the movie with me remarked, she makes you long for what Téa Leoni could bring to the part, and as the movie goes on, Elfman's vacuous, overeager quality returns.

Why, oh why, didn't the moviemakers make Heather Locklear the love interest? She turns up as the star showgirl at Yosemite Sam's saloon, and later suits up in a leather Emma Peel outfit. She looks great, as always (and she's aging about as fast as Dick Clark -- which is to say, as fast as molasses runs in February). More important, Locklear has whip-fast comic timing and a knack for parody. Her appearance hosting "Saturday Night Live" a few years back was one knockout comic display after another. Locklear always seems ready to raise the kind of hell that makes a comedy take flight, and here's hoping some filmmaker will be smart enough to recognize it.

What's strangest about "Looney Tunes: Back in Action" is that the cartoon stars seem as secondary as the humans. Bugs and Daffy don't get much of a chance to cut loose either, and the background gags aren't delineated enough for us to enjoy them.

"Looney Tunes: Back in Action" is painless to sit through and kids will probably enjoy it, especially if they're not all that familiar with the original cartoons and characters. It's not a disgrace, but it is a missed opportunity. "It's a Good Life," Dante's contribution to the "Twilight Zone" movie, was a genuinely unnerving transformation of the physical world into something like a sinister, expressionist Looney Tune. (The image of the young girl whose 10-year-old brother has wished the mouth right off her face isn't one you're likely to forget either in your waking hours or in your dreams.) The memory of those 30 minutes makes the awkward melding of the animated and real here feel prosaic. It's hard not to be disappointed at a Joe Dante movie where the villain's scheme to turn humans into monkeys isn't realized. A world where people behave like monkeys -- where they give themselves over to the id that has always motivated Dante's pop epics -- might make for the ultimate Dante movie.

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