In the old Looney Tunes shorts, Wile E. Coyote was always trying to catch the Road Runner, constructing elaborate traps that inevitably backfired. But he remained persistent, even as the zany (and clearly defective) products he purchased from the Acme Corporation flattened, singed and fricasseed him.
Wile E.’s single-minded crusade inspired the animated-live action hybrid Coyote vs. Acme, which was itself battered about by a large corporation. It’s a long story, but it boils down to this. The film was completed in 2022, but the studio, Warner Bros. Discovery, kept delaying its release. When the company came under new management, they decided to trash the movie and claim it as a tax writeoff. It seemed like it would never see the light of day.
The backlash was loud enough that Warner finally agreed to sell the movie for distribution. And like Wile E. Coyote himself, the movie emerged from a plume of cartoon dust and it’s now in theaters. It’s tempting to praise the movie simply for persevering, but it turns out to be a delightful slapstick comedy, one that understands the inherent appeal of the Looney Tunes.
It’s predicated on a brilliant idea from a New Yorker piece by Ian Frazier: Wile E. Coyote, fed up with his foiled plans, decides to file a lawsuit against the Acme Corporation. He finds Kevin Avery (Will Forte), one of those personal injury lawyers from TV, to take his case. Avery (who gets his name from animator Tex Avery) specializes in representing perpetually injured toons, settling out of court for a few hundred bucks.
But this case is different. The coyote refuses to settle, Acme’s hotshot lawyer (John Cena) gets involved, and Avery and his staff begin to uncover a sinister corporate plot that goes back decades. There’s lots of cloak-and-dagger stuff that would be at home in a John Grisham novel, except with explosions that leave ash on everyone’s faces and cartoon tunnels that get painted onto the sides of buildings.
As in Who Framed Roger Rabbit, still the high water mark of this genre, the human world of Coyote vs. Acme sits in drab contrast to the bright and shiny (but no less sinister) cartoon world: the people are defeated and beat-down, occupying fleabag motels and nondescript strip-mall offices. The ways flesh-and-blood actors and pen-and-ink characters interact aren’t nearly as seamless as in Roger Rabbit, but this movie also has a lot of fun cameos from a deep bench of Looney Tunes characters — including a Deep Throat-like whistleblower with a most distinctive voice.
There is, of course, tremendous irony in Coyote vs. Acme being a victim of real-world corporate greed and a story about a fictional corporation punishing cartoons to benefit its bottom line. Perhaps that’s why it was shelved in the first place. The final product only has a few big laughs — mostly in the beginning as it establishes its cartoon physics — but I was grinning like an idiot through most of it. Maybe it’s because I was happy to finally see it.