ridiculous rating

Purely Joyful Movie!

Mostly, the movie is committed to the value of a good time.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

An attempt at bringing Looney Tunes into the 21st Century (why would we want to do that?), brought to us by the master of nostalgia Joe Dante. Lots of cameos and in-jokes as you would expect from Dante. Also just about every character from a popular WB property is represented, from Scooby Doo to Batman to Robby the Robot, as well as all of the Looney Tunes characters, of course. The live action stuff is hit and miss, with Jenna Elfman and Brendan Fraser likable enough but others like Steve Martin coming across as annoying in their attempts to be funny. The Looney Tunes are all 'off' to me, a huge fan of the original cartoons. These characters just seem hollow copies at best and, at worst, they're bizarrely out-of-character. I especially don't like Daffy in this. It's like someone never saw any of his cartoons, just read a brief description about him and wrote from there. Anyway, I can see a lot of other people really loved this. I don't, obviously. It's fine, I mean, but it just feels like it's trying too hard. I rarely laughed at it. It's more (occasionally) amusing than consistently funny. It looks good, though.

. . . that it's not allowed to have its own home page on this site. FRANK TASHLIN'S STORYBOOKS: TONY AND CLARENCE can be found as a "Special Feature" on Looney Tunes Golden Collection, Volume 4, Disc 2. TONY predicts that the athlete formerly known as Bruce Jenner soon will replace Donald Trump as the U.S. Rich People Party nominee in the 2016 Presidential Election. Some may quibble that Jenner endorsed Trump already, and that Trump clinched the election yesterday when he was awarded the highly coveted American Purple Heart Medal. Though Freberg's narration of Tashlin's 1951 story symbolizes such metal disks as "pennies," Jenner's World Decathlon GOLD Men's Medal trumps Trump's Purple Thingee. Plus, Jenner has closer ties to the U.S. military, having been born the son of a veteran. Since Jenner meets the age and citizenship requirements for the American Presidency, and has a bigger footprint on U.S. "Reality" TV shows than Trump's Birth Certificate Baby Print-sized presence, Jenner is THE logical replacement candidate when Trump self-implodes once and for all. The controversial aspect of TONY AND CLARENCE is that CLARENCE is male--until she comes out as the female "Clarice," who cannot even use the Women's Room in North Carolina!

Looney Tunes: Back in Action (2003): Dir: Joe Dante / Cast: Brendan Fraser, Jenna Elfman, Steve Martin, Timothy Dalton, Heather Locklear: Candy-coated crap with a thread bare plot. It is nowhere near as imaginative as Who Framed Roger Rabbit? It opens with Daffy Duck being fired over a salary dispute over his second nature to Bugs Bunny. Brendan Fraser stars as a security guard and failed stunt guy who is also fired. He is the son of a spy actor who has been kidnapped. He must locate the Blue Monkey diamond before the ACME Corporation does. Jenna Elfman plays a studio head who must locate Daffy when her job is threatened. They foil ambushes by Yosamiti Sam, Wile E. Coyote, Marvin the Martian, Elmer Fudd, and the Tasmanian Devil. Repetitious and stupid with director Joe Dante doing his best but this is a far cry from what we expect from him. Dante previously made such superior films as Gremlins, so this is indeed a sorry sight. The cast are all second nature to the animated characters who themselves seem to be mugging the scene as oppose to becoming an important element of an actual plot. Fraser is a prop, and Elfman is miscast. Steve Martin overacts as the ACME head as does Timothy Dalton as Fraser's father. Heather Locklear plays a character named Dusty Tails, as if we didn't grasp the hint. As Daffy would say, "It's despicable." Score: 2 / 10

Looney Tunes: Back in Action may or may not be what you'd expect from a modern day film focusing on some of the most iconic animated characters in the history of animation. The film is a hybrid of animation and live action, which sometimes works and sometimes doesn't. Here, it provides us with moments of interest, but also, moments that are void of humor and purpose.Still, the look is relatively welcomed, although I can't say I'm wholly fond of these characters being brought into the digital age. It would've been more fitting to see this gang in a live action film in their traditional hand drawn style of animation. But time is fleeting and the patience for craftsmanship like that is thin. I might as well have wished for a Looney Tunes movie done in claymation.The story is simply a cacophony on film. We begin by seeing Daffy Duck, who is sick of always playing secondhand man to Bugs Bunny (both voiced by Joe Alaskey). After demanding his own film to Warner Bros. studios, he is hastily fired by VP of Comedy Kate Houghton (Jenna Elfman). Security guard of Warner Bros. lot, DJ Drake (Brendan Fraser), is also fired after causing trouble trying to escort Daffy off the property.Something of a spy plot brews, when DJ discovers his famous father was a secret agent. This inspires both him and Daffy to drive down to Las Vegas, where more of their camaraderie will surely take place, as they get in trouble with a corporation called "Acme," ran by a barely recognizable Steve Martin, and begin to stumble upon a slew of inventions created for inevitable mishaps. There's also a nice trip to Area 52, and that's not a typo.Just like the infamous Warner Bros. cartoons, Looney Tunes: Back in Action follows the anarchic blueprint of the shorts, making them as zany and as logic-defying as possible. Is it faithful to the original shorts? Yes. It is always fun to watch? Not quite. To prepare myself for this event, I watched a couple of the classic shorts, including Rabbit Seasoning and What's Opera, Doc?, both directed by the late and great Chuck Jones. There's something captivating and compelling about the shorts that the film sort of lacks. I believe it's the transportation into the real world that jumbles the film up. It's made a tad more mainstream than it should be, and sort of obscures the obvious non-reality the shorts occupied.What too makes the shorts so sweet and charming is the waves of nostalgia that bleed off of them and the fact that they're so clearly cartoons. Trying to incorporate them in the real world doesn't work as well. In the Looney Tunes original feature film, Space Jam, it worked a bit better, maybe because the action on the court was very reminiscent of the one-setting shorts the characters starred in. Here, they are given such a wide range and such little discipline that, after a while, the event is exhausting and monotonous.Brendan Fraser works well in his lead, as he clearly has respect for the franchise and the legacy of the "Tunes" (and loves to take punches at himself). Jenna Elfman and Steve Martin work well in the supporting cast, and the voices of all the characters, as well as their appearances, do not fail to provide everyone's face with a smile.I chuckled a few times and sort of smiled when the film became stylistic (particularly during the scene where Elmer Fudd, Daffy, and Bugs are jumping in and out of famous portraits in Paris). But those smiles and chuckles quickly turned to moot feelings when the film became too concerned with snappy witticisms and indescribably chaotic sensibilities. Little, little kids might enjoy it, but it's hard to say where lifelong fans will stand. Two and a half stars seems like a fair compromise from someone who enjoyed the characters enough to give their ninety-one minute anarchic piece a try.Starring: Brendan Fraser, Jenna Elfman, Steve Martin, Timothy Dalton, Heather Locklear, and Joan Cusack. Voiced by: Joe Alaskey. Directed by: Joe Dante.