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Verdict: The rascally rabbit and demented duck are in classic form in a film featuring stellar performances by Looney Tunes characters, supported by some real life loony actors.

By MELINDA ENNIS
Cox News Service

Bugs and Daffy are back with comic vengeance in “Looney Tunes: Back in Action,” a movie with moments that recall the best of the classic cartoons — and that's not all folks.

The slapstick shtick keeps the kids laughing, while the knowing references and gags that only the grown-ups will get keep us going right along with them. The movie mixes live-action and animation, a la “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?,” but for my money, the bunny and company are funnier and win the better film race by a hare.

The story pits Bugs versus Daffy Duck in a familiar fight over star supremacy at the studio run by accountant-like twins named, of course, the Warner Brothers. Daffy is tired of being blown up and bludgeoned by Elmer Fudd, while Bugs always emerges with carrot intact.

He is summarily fired by a studio executive (Jenna Elfman, displaying the comedic skills she honed in the TV series “Dharma and Greg”). Daffy is booted from the studio by a security guard (Brendan Fraser), a wanna-be stunt man who is also the son of famous James Bond-style star, played by Timothy Dalton (wink-wink, a former Bond himself).

Fraser is fetching and funny delivering the same comic goofiness and self-deprecating humor he employed in “George of the Jungle.” He and Daffy set off to save his kidnapped father, revealed to be a real spy, and foil a plot by the evil Acme Corp. (the company Wile E. Coyote famously employs to blow up the Road Runner).

Steve Martin plays the Acme Corp.'s chairman as a version of his Ruprick, the imbecile brother from “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels.” While Martin has some funny moments, including a bit involving his attempts to work a TV remote control, the Looney Tunes character cameos steal the show.

As our heroes traverse the desert, Paris and outer space in search of Fraser's dad, they encounter Wile E. Coyote as Acme's special “desert operative,” Pepe Le Pew as a Parisian gendarme and Marvin the Martian as himself.

And, yes, that's ancient actor Kevin McCarthy clutching a pod in a homage to his role in the 1956 “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.”

The piece de resistance is a masterful work of animated innovation as the characters run through a faux Louvre in Paris, hopping in and out of famous paintings and adapting to the artistic style of each one. Elmer Fudd's gun melts along with the clocks in Salvador Dali's “The Persistence of Memory,” and he emerges as a pointillist figure from George Seurat's famous “Sunday Afternoon,” only to be scattered to the winds by Bugs holding an electric fan.

Although the plot is convoluted with moments that are too over-the-top, and not all the cameos score, you'll be glad the Looney Tunes gang is back with their acerbic wit and impeccable comic timing intact.