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Looney Tunes prove they're 'Back in Action'
Daffy Duck and Bugs Bunny, Jenna Elfman and Brendan Fraser star in 'Looney Tunes: Back in Action'
Warner Bros. Pictures
Director: Joe Dante
Stars: Brendan Fraser, Jenna Elfman, Steve Martin
MPAA rating: PG for some mild language and innuendo
Bugs Bunny poses with a fishing reel for a split second and exclaims, "Hey, whadya know? I found Nemo."
It succeeds as only a fraction of the others do because "Looney's" target audience saw "Finding Nemo" two, five or even 10 times in the past six months. And so their parents got the joke, too.
How many will get the spoof of "Psycho's" shower scene? Or an appearance by MGM mid-1950s star Robbie the Robot? Or cameos by Wile E. Coyote, Foghorn Leghorn, Speedy Gonzalez, Yosemite Sam, Tweety and Granny and many others from the Warner Bros. cartoon stable?
I was blown away by the cunning of showing cheesy TV-style cartoon characters in a few frames, just to make the unspoken point that Looney Tunes folks look like comparative Rembrandts.
And by Kevin McCarthy rushing by to warn us of the "Invasion of the Body Snatchers," as he did in 1956, but in a black-and-white swatch within a color image.
It's all quite dazzling.
We haven't had such a stunning mesh of live action and animation since "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?" (1988) nor such an elaborate inside take on Hollywood since "The Player" (1992).
And yet for all of its brilliance, the Larry Doyle-written and Joe Dante-directed "Looney Tunes" is only a qualified success precisely because it gilds the lily.
It's a plump Thanksgiving turkey -- in the best sense -- of a movie. But not knowing where to stop or how to pace it, Doyle and Dante stuff their bird to the bursting point with more ingredients than it can comfortably accommodate -- lemon drops, chocolate and lettuce.
"Roger Rabbit" also set up parallel universes of humans and 'toons with overlapping worries in the context of a 1940s private-eye melodrama to which it was true throughout.
But in "Looney Tunes," so much convoluted content converges so fast and in so compressed a form for 90 solid minutes that it's like being on speed in a half-animated dream.
The premise is a beaut. At a front-office meeting chaired by the Warner brothers (Dan and Don Stanton), egotistical star Bugs Bunny flouts his influence while Daffy Duck, overplaying his hand, gets canned by Kate Houghton (Jenna Elfman of "Dharma & Greg"), the humorless vice president of comedy.
(Note that Kate Houghton is the first two-thirds of Katharine Hepburn's name as well as that of actress-playwright-niece Katharine Houghton.)
Daffy heads for Las Vegas with Warner security guard DJ Drake (Brendan Fraser), who is Brendan Fraser's "Mummy" stuntman and the son of 007-like star Damian Drake (Timothy Dalton), who really is a secret agent, it turns out. (See what I mean?)
Discovering too late that Daffy is invaluable to a picture being made, Kate and Bugs catch up with Daffy and DJ and head for Paris (especially the Louvre), for segues into surrealism and pointilism, and then off to Africa for a sort of "Raiders of the Blue Monkey Diamond."
Steve Martin, one of many identifiable supporting players (along with Joan Cusack, Bill Goldberg and Heather Locklear), appears as the demented head of the Acme Corp., which made all of the malfunctioning weapons in the Road Runner cartoons.
It's all superbly rendered but with a density that becomes overwhelming at feature length. You might share my feeling of being a kid in a candy store for the first half-hour. But gradually, the sheer intensity of the ideas and images can wear you down.
When Daffy finally sputters, "This doesn't make a lick of sense," I couldn't have agreed more, but by then, I honestly couldn't be sure. A 20-course meal, seasoned to a fare-thee-well, can do that to you.
