Looney Tunes: Back in Action (2003): B+

Admirably living up to its illustrious pedigree, Looney Tunes: Back in Action is like a pop culture-gorged Hope-and-Crosby buddy flick hopped up on mescaline. Working in the same rapid-fire vein as Gremlins 2: The New Batch, director Joe Dante (with a script by Larry Doyle) crams his delirious film so full of cinematic allusions, fourth wall-shattering gags, and jabs at Hollywood and American consumerism that there’s almost no time for a plot, which is fine considering that the nominal story – about Bugs, Daffy, security guard/stuntman/movie star’s son DJ (Brendan Frasier), and Tinseltown producer Kate (Jenna Elfman) – is just a cross-country-traversing vehicle built to carry a heavy load of self-referential jokes and WB icon cameos. Its hit-or-miss bits succeeding at least as often as not, the overstuffed film manages to keep itself from exploding through a combination of faithful voice work, superbly blended live-action and 2-D animation, a go-for-broke slapsticky dynamism that would make Chuck Jones proud, and a shrewd awareness that the heart and soul of classic Looney Tunes cartoons resides not in Bugs’ omnipotent cool but, rather, in Daffy’s second-banana inferiority complex. Aside from Steven Martin’s spectacularly cartoony buffoonery as villainous ACME boss Mr. Chairman, the film’s human characters are no match for their hand-drawn counterparts, with Fraser and Elfman’s tit-for-tat Grant-and-Hepburn chemistry routinely undermined by the presence of the significantly more entertaining rabbit and duck. Still, whether it’s a priceless disguise-unzippering gag involving a former space-jammer, or the film’s Louvre-set pièce de résistance, Looney Tunes: Back in Action’s wascally zaniness is tough to resist.