fter years of getting blasted, tortured, clobbered and blown up for laughs, Daffy Duck has had enough of being second banana to Bugs Bunny. When he takes his case to the Warner Brothers board room, however, he finds the executives less than sympathetic. Kate Houghton (Elfman), vice president of comedy, is ordered to fire the troublesome duck and remove him from the lot.
The thorny task of ejecting Daffy falls to studio security guard and aspiring stuntman D.J. Drake (Fraser). After a long chase around the Warner Brothers lot, D.J. finally manages to get rid of Daffy, or so he thinks. When Daffy realizes that D.J. is the son of famed action star Damian Drake (Timothy Dalton), he decides to attach himself to D.J.'s side for good.
D.J.'s life becomes even more complicated when he learns that his father's acting career is just a cover for his true identity as an international spy. It seems that Damien has been kidnapped by the evil chairman of the Acme Corporation (Martin) while in pursuit of a mystical artifact known as the Blue Monkey Diamond. Determined to save his father, D.J. sets out on an international quest with Daffy in tow.
Meanwhile, back in Hollywood, Bugs Bunny's movie is falling flat without Daffy. Kate is ordered by the studio heads to get the duck back—or else. Together with Bugs, Kate sets out in search of Daffy, and the two of them become tangled up in D.J.'s adventure.
Along the way, a collection of cartoon Acme operatives including Yosemite Sam, the Coyote and Marvin the Martian try to thwart the foursome, but they manage to escape danger with the help Damien's allies, Dusty Tails (Heather Locklear), an undercover spy posing as a Vegas showgirl, and Mother (Joan Cusack), the head of a mysterious laboratory known as Area 52. In the end, D.J., Kate, Daffy and Bugs could be all that stands between Mr. Chairman and his plans for total world domination.
Looney—but terribly out of tune
Despite an obvious affection for the spirit of the original Looney Tunes cartoons, Looney Tunes: Back in Action falls short of success because of its ill-conceived and poorly executed storyline. Early on, the plot diverges into two disparate elements, the struggle to get Bugs' new animated film made and the James Bond-esque search for the Blue Monkey Diamond. In the first, Bugs and Daffy are acknowledged as actors in the Warner Brother stable, a clever (if unoriginal) idea with untapped potential. In the second, the rest of the Looney Tunes gang are cast as foils in a ridiculous story that bears only a weak connection to the first in the form of Fraser's character. The filmmakers try to have it both ways, but it only makes for a jumbled mess.
As the human heroes, Fraser and Elfman do an admirable job with the difficult task of acting alongside their animated co-stars. Unfortunately, Locklear is not as proficient, and looks glaringly out of place in her brief appearance as a singing and dancing spy. Martin makes some brave but baffling choices for the Chairman, from his odd, accented pronunciation of Blue "Mon-kay," to the oversized schoolboy outfit he wears, to the occasional off-balance pratfall.
The best scene in the film features none of the human cast, however. In an animated chase through the Louvre museum in Paris, the characters run through one painting after another (some of which aren't actually in the Louvre, but that may be nitpicking), taking on the styles of famous artists including Salvador Dalí, Georges Seurat and Henri Toulouse-Lautrec. It's a funny and skillfully animated sequence that wouldn't seem out of place in a classic Bugs Bunny cartoon.
At times, the film does recapture the irreverent humor of those cartoons, but the clumsy narrative too often gets in the way. Rather than actually resolving story problems like getting characters from one place to another, the filmmakers simply transport them there and gloss over the illogical twists with lazy, "it's just a movie" gags. Contrary to the notions of Hollywood movie studios, today's audiences are savvy enough to know when their intelligence is being insulted.
