This is all just...not me.

[Note: I believe this is the movie that officially broke Two Dollar Cinema. This post has been in my drafts since September (for a movie I watched in July). I'm going to leave whatever dated nonsense in here...in here. I want to revive/reinvent this site, but I must exorcise some demons first, apparently]

Playoff time, I'd say hockey, likely through a crooked beard. In the Brady days, I might have considered the NFL (honestly, I loved Drew Bledsoe more...*ducks*), though when the Sox finally reversed the curse, I may or may not have considered getting a tattoo of their logo. On my face.

But gun-to-head/junk, basketball has always been the game I love the most, and when someone thought of combining it with the Looney Tunes in 1996, at the time I was convinced that magic had truly happened. Well, not Magic-magic, but you know what I mean, movie magic. And when I heard they were finally making a sequel - twenty years later - with LeBron James no less, only two words came to mind:

F--k that. No thanks.

And that'll about do it, honestly, as I loathed just about every single thing, top-to-bottom, in the Warner Bros. flavored diarrhea known as Space Jam 2: A New Legacy. Hell, even my kids didn't like it, and they're not middle-aged douche canoes like the rest of us. Er, me. Just me.

Fine, maybe it's not that bad (oh it most certainly is), but everything about it feels...forced at best, soul-crushingly stupid at worst. The first flick is by no means a masterpiece, obviously, but it's charming and has its heart in the right place. And, uh, seemingly understood the basic tenets of basketball (and coherence).

This time around, someone who just double-featured The Lego Movie and Ready Player One thought, you know what this needs? A sleepy LeBron James, an absolutely manic Don Cheadle, and a pouty kid permanently stuck doing whatever he wants to do, gosh! Oh, I'm sorry, is that a dated reference that no one under the age of thirty-five gets? Hmm. Lot of that going around lately...

On a tour of the Warner Bros. studios, Lebron and his kids are shown some new thing that's entire angle is to make movies worse. Much worse. While LeBron ain't exactly feeling it, his son Dom is, as this kid is way more interested in AI than say, A.I. Yeah, turns out even LeBron's kid doesn't like basketball all that much, and would much rather be a videogame designer. Fine, that's not the worst outline ....

Speaking of forced inclusion for no apparent reason, here are the Yays and Boos. For the record, this was one of those 'we're going to watch this as a family' movies (why that always sounds like a threat, I'll never know), and it took us four shots to make it to the end. Four. And that only applies to three of us. Mom, shockingly, went 0-4 and never made it further than halfway.

Yaaaaaaaaaay!

• You can never go wrong with Ghetto Superstar. Mya's voice is one of the prettiest things I've ever heard...[gazes off into the distance]
• I support the stealing of Marvin Martian's ship and leaving him stranded because a) he sucks and always has and b) I hate him (he's almost as bad as Pepe Le Pew...who even as I kid I could sense he was a bit too rapey?)
• Even if it's shameless and pointless, I was at least interested in Looney Tunes characters turning up in  classic WB-owned films. Wile E. Coyote in Mad Max? Sounds good. Sylvester in Austin Powers? Yep, I'll take some of that, too. 
• You make me hate basketball! Same kid, saaaaaaaaame.
• LeBron wanted Trinity from the Matrix on his team...and I'm 100% on board with this for, well, various reasons.
• Okay, I wrote a note that the WB Security Guard Guy is the MVP of this movie. I have no recollection of this man and why I love him so, but I'm going to assume it's because he looked directly into the camera and said This is all a bunch of bullshit and I'm out of here and you can all go straight to Hell and die. Fingers crossed that's what it was.
• The background is full of cast-off characters and mfers who look like the coked-out a-holes adorning the Costume City costume, um, bags...but I did spot Judy Jetson back there, and I'm pretty sure time slowed down Big Fish-style. Eep Opp Ork Ah-Ah, you know?
• Spider-Lady (who sucks) is at one point seen cycling the ball of LeBron's head, and well, my permanent frown might have unclenched itself for a second or two.
• Speaking of a glorious second or two, Michael B. Jordan's impossibly handsome self shows up and my whole family swooned. Damn that dude is dreamy.
• And finally, well, not much else. But I'm at the part where the Yays are complete, so...this post is almost done. At least I've got that going for me...

Boooooooooooooo!

• Ah, man. David Stern, RIP.
• For f--k's sake, the ServerVerse? Was the name Movie Poop Chute already taken?
• Look, I love Don Cheadle, love love love my man Buck Swope, even if he yelled me on Twitter about Steph Curry (he claimed talent being a gift from God was disrespectful to all the work Steph has put in and I thought it was more of a lazy compliment), regardless - I hated everything about his character in this one. I get it, Don't dialing up the ridiculousness for the slow kids in the back, but my goodness, I'd rather every scene with him just be Don out-of-character cashing his checks at the bank instead of whatever the Hell was going on here. I'd say he's a natural but, nope...that's all his hard work, right there.
• Okay, Pete, whatever the Hell he is, is basically the shunned cousin of that Microsoft paperclip guy from 1993, but this time, try as I might, I couldn't right click his ass off the screen,
• So, the premise of this whole movie is rooted in the idea that LeBron's son doesn't want to play basketball...he wants to design video games. Like, using a computer...and actually designing a game. And this is a problem??? If the kid was building a super-hooker out of the parts of exploded hookers...fine...maybe we want to steer him to roundball. But this? THIS? 
• I know Mel Blanc couldn't live forever, but whoever they got doing Bugs' voice now, is uh, problematic to put it nicely.
• Speaking of the voicework, most of the voices sound hollow, right? Like they did the whole thing over Zoom or something...
• You know how I mentioned that I liked the bits where they put the Looney Tunes into old movies? I did. At first. Then they just get weird and stupid. The Granny in The Matrix? What mall-survey led to this pairing?
• Probably the same person who voted for Bugs as M.C. Hammer, honestly.
• LeBron's wife looked like Ola from Sex Ed. That's not a Boo, unless you think that she looks like Ola's mom, and well...if you watch the show...nevermind.
• That Porky rapping bit is as bad as you've heard and maybe even worse. If there's a broken escalator to Hell, it's lined with screens featuring this scene and only this scene.
• I thought Bugs actually died for a second and I was happy for him. Happy for us.
• And finally, and I know it's such a dick move to say this, but, man...the kid in this movie sucks. He's gotta carry too much of what's going on here, and I was not a fan. Likely, it's not his fault, and just the byproduct of spending too many hours with whiny kids that age, but my goodness, everything about the Dom's character was like someone stabbing me directly in the balls.

Aw, shit. Do you know what happened last night? After finally finishing this f--king post (well, up through the Boos), I clicked on HBO and sure enough, this flaming turd was on. It was near the end, when LeBron and the Toon Squad finally face off against Dom and the Good Squad, and you know what? 

Both my kids suddenly appeared in the room. 

My daughter was making Christmas cookies with my wife, and my son, well, he's in 7th grade, so God knows what that little weirdo was doing, but regardless, the both show up, like, why's this on? I explain to them that sometimes, shows actually start without your input (I don't think they fully understood). Anyhow, you know what they did next? They sat down. And quietly watched it till the end. And you know what else? They enjoyed it.

So, like I said...this is the movie that broke Two Dollar Cinema.