Looney Tunes: Back in Action

The general sense I get from this is that Joe Dante wanted to make one film, and the studio just kept muzzling him for whatever reason. Who knows why, but maybe it was a fear that the denizens of Termite Terrace needed to be softer to be more palatable to modern audiences. I don’t know, it’s just a shot in the dark. For every anarchic, free-for-all sequence, I’m thinking of Joan Cusack’s Mother and Area 52 falling into chaos with monster movie cameos galore, there’s another like the Dusty Trails musical interlude, wherein we watch Heather Locklear change skimpy outfits then promptly vanish, that simply feel like half-formed jokes with no payoff or reason for inclusion. Looney Tunes: Back in Action didn’t exactly live up to its promise, but it’s silly, it’s goofy, and it is clearly trying to reclaim the cinematic chaos so built into the brand. It gets points for trying even if the much buzzed return to greatness was more marketing razzle-dazzle than deliverable goods.