Looney Tunes: Back in Action

MOVIE #1,886 • 🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿 • 08.14.24 Widely considered the last good (or pretty good) Joe Dante movie, Warner Brothers’ bid to bring back the Looney Tunes franchise on the silver screen came with the biggest budget he would ever have by a wide margin. I'm not a Looney Tunes aficionado by any means, but I still appreciate their brand of wacky shenanigans. Dante, who has referenced Bugs and the gang directly in several of his films, was probably the perfect choice to helm this feature-length reboot. But as these things often go, creative control was wrangled away and he wound up calling it “the longest year and a half of [his] life.” Still, this manages to capture the spirit of the characters’ anarchic energy better than any other longform cinematic iteration.

And then we get to Steve Martin’s character. Man this performance is A LOT. WHAT is this voice?! It doesn't really work to be this cartoonish because that's what THE CARTOONS are there for!! You can't out-kooky Daffy Duck or Bugs Bunny. Why would you even try? I'm not saying he should have played it straight but what he did here is a total failure. Every second is a complete head-scratching, unfunny mess…


This film is littered with countless in-jokes and meta references, both to WB/Looney Tunes lore, Dante’s career itself and other classic media (standouts include Kevin McCarthy’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers cameo, the Gremlin car/soundtrack Easter egg, and Bugs’s Psycho parody). Even though he was not in charge of the animation (Eric Goldberg is credited as co-director), the purely cartoon elements/sequences are honestly stronger than the live-action and mixed footage. When the crew gets sucked into famous paintings, it’s genuinely fantastic…


Compare that to this green screen hell…


The reveal that Steve Martin’s evil motivation is that he wants to transform every human into a monkey is… something. I'm not saying I expected more out of the plot but this was lazy (and Steve Martin’s over-the-top vibe certainly is helping matters).

But despite all its flaws, this is still 90 minutes of nearly non-stop chaotic action. It’s an enjoyable watch overall and Brendan Fraser is totally committed in the lead role as a wannabe stuntman turned hero (he even voiced the Tasmanian Devil very effectively). It is, in fact, pretty good.

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Looney Tunes: Back in Action is a 2003 American live-action/animated comedy film produced by Warner Bros. Feature Animation and distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures. It is the second fully original theatrical feature film in the Looney Tunes franchise, and was directed by Joe Dante from a screenplay by Larry Doyle. Brendan Fraser, Jenna Elfman, and Steve Martin star in the film; Timothy Dalton, Heather Locklear, and Bill Goldberg appear in supporting roles, while Joe Alaskey leads the voice cast. Its plot, which parodies action and spy film conventions, follows Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck (Alaskey) as they become intertwined in a plot by the ACME Chairman (Martin) to transform the world's population into subservient monkeys using the Blue Monkey diamond. They accompany aspiring stuntman DJ Drake (Fraser) and Warner Bros. executive Kate Houghton (Elfman) on their journey to thwart the Chairman's plot, which doubles as a mission to rescue the former's abducted father, Damian (Dalton). It was released on November 9, 2003.