Basketball Movie Review
Space Jam: A New Legacy
LeBron inherits the Looney Tunes jersey and gets dropped into a Warner Bros. server universe where basketball competes with two hours of corporate intellectual-property fireworks.
Messier and less iconic than the original, but too significant to leave out of a basketball movie store built around culture as well as quality.
Movie details
2021 · 1h 55m · Comedy · Family
Director Malcolm D. Lee
- LeBron James — Himself
- Don Cheadle — Al-G Rhythm
- Cedric Joe — Dom James
- Malcolm D. Lee directed the 2021 sequel, with LeBron James starring and producing alongside Ryan Coogler, Maverick Carter and Duncan Henderson.
- The film arrived 25 years after the original Space Jam and combines live action, animation and a fictional Warner Bros. digital universe around its basketball game.
01
The Take
A New Legacy makes the classic sequel mistake of believing the world needs to become larger when the original's charm came from being simple and weird. LeBron is game, the Looney Tunes still work and the father-son story has a usable spine, but the server-verse keeps interrupting basketball with reminders of everything Warner Bros. owns.
02
Does the Basketball Hold Up?
The movie's Goon Squad at least reflects a newer generation of basketball stars and archetypes, while the central conflict around LeBron and his son touches a real sports-parent question: whether a kid has to love the game in exactly the way the famous parent does. The actual game is pure digital chaos.
03
Best Basketball Moment
The quieter father-son basketball conflict before the giant final game, because that is where the movie briefly finds a human basketball problem underneath the franchise machinery.
04
Ball Cred
LeBron James stars as a fictionalised version of himself and the film uses current basketball figures as the foundation for its powered-up Goon Squad opponents.