Michael Jordan, Wayne Knight, Bill Murray, Theresa Randle
There are no more ingratiating characters in the popular culture than Michael Jordan and Bugs Bunny, but even their monumental charisma is sorely tested in this charmless, vastly overhyped and greedily overmerchandised animated/live-action basketball comedy. Jordan, who acts with the same easy grace with which he plays basketball, plays himself amiably even when he is spoofing his own brief baseball career. The movie is confusingly set during Jordan's minor-league baseball interregnum with the Birmingham (Ala.) Barons. While he is there, he is shanghaied by Bugs, Daffy and the rest of the Looney Tunes stable. They have been challenged to a basketball game by a weaselly gang of cartoons from another planet whose theme park, Moron Mountain, needs new attractions. The bad 'toons steal the talent of current pro players Patrick Ewing, Charles Barkley, Shawn Bradley, Larry Johnson and Muggsey Bogues. (They all appear, though the retired Larry Bird is the only player other than Jordan to distinguish himself as an actor.) Knight plays the Barons' obsequious publicity director, while Randle is Jordan's wife and Murray a frustrated jock who joins Jordan and the Looney Tunes, adding little athletic finesse and not much humor. The lack of wit, though, is not Murray's fault. The script by Steve Rudnick, Leo Benvenuti, Timothy Harris and Herschel Weingrod is mundane, its high point coming when Bugs and Daffy lament that they don't get a cut from all that Looney Tunes merchandise. (PG)
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