AS FAR BACK AS I CAN remember, I have always looked to see what I could find in clouds. The man in the moon did not interest me for long, where clouds always provided me with a variety of things to look at. For example, some of the things I have found in clouds have been the head of a horse with its flowing mane, a bow and arrow, a runner, numerous profiles of people, an assortment of insects and animals, and different car and truck models. Now that I am thinking about it, clouds were my version of Instagram and TikTok. I say this because I only had a short time to discover the item in the cloud before it was slowly swallowed back into the cloud’s depths. My fascination with finding hidden things in things soon expanded beyond the clouds. I used to love going through those optical illusion Magic Eye photos/pictures, where a secret image was within it. I think another word for it was Autostereograms. Discovering the secret image was a thrill for me as a kid; all it took was a little refocusing of the eye before the image would appear out of the picture I was viewing.      LIKE MOST CHILDREN, I WAS NEVER thrilled to go to the doctor’s office. However, I did enjoy the waiting room because they had a children’s magazine that always had a page with a drawing that contained 6 or 7 hidden objects within it. If I had not finished finding all items before the nurse called my name, I would bring the magazine with me into the exam room. One birthday I received a subscription to the magazine; you would have thought someone had just given me a year’s worth of free chocolate candy; I was so excited by the gift. After training myself to seek out images within pictures, I discovered I was not alone in this practice. The director Alfred Hitchcock, I found out, enjoyed placing himself in a cameo role within his movies. Nothing major, he usually was in the background of a scene, either walking in the middle of the crowd or getting off a bus where the two major stars were waiting to get on board. I enjoyed trying to find him in the middle of his films; the same goes for Stan Lee, the creative force behind Marvel Comics, who could be found doing a cameo in the various Marvel superhero movies. Little did I know my fondness for spotting cameos would go into overdrive during this adventure comedy picture.      AFTER BEING PULLED INTO A NEFARIOUS artificial intelligence’s game, there was no choice but for sports celebrity LeBron James to play the game to get his family back together. With Don Cheadle (No Sudden Move, The Guard) as Al G. Rhythm, Cedric Joe (Loving Him, Good Trouble-TV) as Dom James, Khris Davis (Judas and the Black Messiah, Detroit) as Malik and Sonequa Martin-Green (The Walking Dead-TV, Star Trek: Discovery) as Kamiyah James; this animated film was best suited for younger audiences. I say this because as an adult, I felt the script was not the best along with being predictable. In addition, it showed LeBron was not a good actor. If one is a fan of the Looney Tune comics, they more than likely would enjoy the cartoon characters’ antics through the story. As I mentioned before, the highlight for me was the vast amount of cameo appearances by Warner Brother’s stable of licensed characters. At one point I was wondering if Warner Brothers was using this film to promote upcoming film projects; there were so many places to find them that I kept getting distracted from concentrating, as it were, on the main focus of the story. Because the first film was new and fresh to viewers, this one lacked the fun punch it needed to keep my interest. Sort of like looking at the fleeting image in a beautiful cloud before disappearing.                     

2 stars