Looney Tunes: Back in Action (2003)

Looney Tunes: Back in Action arrived in 2003 as a pointed corrective to its predecessor, a film Joe Dante openly disdained. His stated approach was a gagfest, a machine that moves from bit to bit and location to location without pretending to a compelling narrative. Bugs and Daffy bicker over billing, a studio executive named Kate Houghton fires one of them and is then ordered to rehire him, and Brendan Fraser plays a stuntman who eventually punches a fictionalized Brendan Fraser. It is a spy parody assembled by people who loved the old shorts and resented what had been done with them.

The antagonist is the Acme Corporation, whose chairman intends to devolve the entire population into monkeys, put them to work making his products, then restore them so they can purchase those products. This is a corporate villain drawn in the broadest cartoon strokes, with Steve Martin in a super nerd costume reportedly modeled on Bill Gates. The satire lands as slapstick and stops there. No argument is advanced about capital, no system is indicted, and the film never slows down long enough to lecture anyone about anything. Kate Houghton is a competent executive, which the film treats as a fact of casting, not a statement.

The remainder of the ledger is empty. The ensemble is a standard early-2000s comedy lineup. There is no identity-conscious casting, no queer subtext, no engagement with race, no environmental concern, no body politics, no neurodivergent reading, and no revision of history. The film's only conviction is that a gag, properly timed, outranks a moral. Dante got what he wanted. The box office did not agree.