Space Jam: A New Legacy, review: a witless, money-grubbing, cringeworthy sequel

• Dir: Malcolm D Lee. Starring: LeBron James, Don Cheadle, Cedric Joe; Jeff Bergman, Eric Bauza, Zendaya, Jim Cummings (voices). U cert, 115 mins

The original 1996 Space Jam, which paired Michael Jordan with the animated Looney Tunes gang, was born of a Nike advert. So perhaps it’s not surprising – even if utterly dispiriting – that its sequel is a slick but soulless plug for Warner Bros’ properties. The real supervillain here? Brand synergy.

Bizarrely, Malcolm D Lee’s plodding movie critiques that crassness by casting LeBron James. The basketball star attends a meeting at Warner Bros’ California studios, where executives share their supercomputer algorithm’s pitch: digitally integrating James into the likes of Game of Thrones, Harry Potter and Batman. The idea – which sitcom 30 Rock parodied in 2007 with SeinfeldVision – is, huffs James, “straight-up bad.” And yet it dominates the actual film.

A shame, because James is a more natural performer than Jordan (low bar though that is), landing gags such as “Athletes acting? That never goes well.” And Cedric Joe is an instant charmer as his preteen son Dom. Dad wants him to work seriously at basketball – that was his childhood coach’s life-changing philosophy – but Dom, a coding whiz, is more excited about building a video game.

While visiting Warner Bros, father and son get sucked into its ServerVerse by the sentient algorithm, aka Al-G Rhythm (Don Cheadle, flamboyantly evil), who wants to commandeer James’s millions of social-media followers. The resulting arc is safely predictable, with life lessons about valuing family while giving others space to be themselves.

But the film’s celebration of Dom’s creativity is completely at odds with its constant derivativeness. Some of that is just lazy sequel writing. It’s exactly the same plot: a towering villain forces a famous athlete to play a crucial game of basketball, aided by Looney Tunes favourites. As Bugs Bunny quips: “Sounds awfully familiar.” That section, in which an animated LeBron first encounters Bugs, offers a glimmer of freewheeling old-school slapstick. It doesn’t last: the toons are then transformed into hideous 3D.

And, like King Kong rampaging through New York – yes, the big ape makes an appearance – Warners keep pummelling us with their back catalogue. James visits Austin Powers, Mad Max: Fury Road and (sacrilege) Casablanca. We find Lola Bunny among Wonder Woman’s Amazons (and wouldn’t you rather be watching that movie?), while Granny gets the same Matrix bullet-time joke as Shrek’s Princess Fiona did back in 2001.

It’s impossible to focus on the climactic basketball game when the surreal spectator stands feature not just the Iron Giant and Flintstones, but the Droogs from A Clockwork Orange, several Jokers, Pennywise and Bette Davis’s character from What Ever Happened To Baby Jane?

To what end, though, other than to fuel horrifying nightmares, or to remind us that you can find all this stuff on HBO Max? Warners have taken a fun, kid-friendly franchise and cynically dunked on it. While the first Space Jam had quirky elements such as a gatecrashing Bill Murray, this sequel simply isn’t looney enough.

In cinemas from Friday