Coyote vs. ACME’s tagline is: The movie ACME doesn’t want you to see. That dovetails neatly with Warner Bros.’ treatment of director Dave Green’s animated/live-action comedy hybrid. The film finished in November 2023, yet Warner Bros. never released it, aiming for a $30 million tax write-off. Fans made such a big stink that Warner Bros. sold it, but not before taking another two-plus years to mull it over.
Let’s set the scene. Wile E. Coyote sets a trap for Roadrunner and lies in wait. Instead of two-dimensional vistas and tumbleweeds, wind turbines and fighter jets populate the backdrop, giving Coyote bigger obstacles to crash into. And Coyote’s latest shipment from ACME botches the job again. Rather than take it on the chin and carry on, Coyote finally cracks. He retreats to his den, where we’re treated to a montage of his many failures. An ad for cartoon personal injury lawyer Kevin Avery (Will Forte) leads Coyote to the big city to take ACME down, though he can’t help but use more ACME contraptions to get there.
The original Wile E. Coyote shorts ran about five minutes long. That obviously isn’t enough to sustain a feature film, but writer Samy Burch (May December) spreads a deep love of Looney Tunes throughout the script. She keeps the audience engaged but knows when to swerve from the legal thriller to indulge in cartoon chaos. I never tire of a tunnel painted on a wall producing a speeding train that runs down everyone near it. And apparently neither do the filmmakers behind Coyote vs. ACME.
Coyote arrives to find Avery is far from the confident professional in TV spots. Forte droops like a depressed rain cloud, resisting all genuine attempts to get justice for his client. ACME is too powerful, he says. They own every market and have a team of monster lawyers, like Buddy Crane (John Cena), to dismantle legal challenges to their empire. Avery begs Wile E. Coyote to take Buddy’s offer because he knows that the odds of winning are slim. From his time working under Buddy, Avery knows that his opposing counsel will do anything to win. Anything.
Gee, why did Discovery want to get rid of this when they bought WB?
I say this only with enthusiasm: In terms of hiring a man to play a cartoon unscrupulous lawyer, you can’t do better than Cena. He’s proved himself a strong actor in Peacemaker, but his scenes with Tweety Bird are some of the film’s biggest laughs. Buddy will go to any lengths for ACME, and his smirks at Avery and Coyote are slathered with disdain. Every animated film needs an antagonist you love to hate, and John Cena provides Coyote vs. ACME with a villain you keep waiting to come back.
Green and Burch honour Wile E. Coyote’s inability to speak, instead relying on Coyote’s hand-drawn signs and his endlessly expressive mug to convey everything the audience needs to know. As much as the concept of Wile E. Coyote suing ACME is a joke, there’s a surprisingly emotional heart beating at the film’s centre. For decades, Coyote was the embodiment of a born loser. Coyote vs. ACME rebrands him as a loner selflessly taking up the cause against large corporations. Years of failure don’t make that time wasted, and that’s a genuinely moving concept in our bizarre current timeline. I just didn’t anticipate it would come from a cartoon coyote. Similarly, Avery learns from Coyote to fix himself, with the prodding of his niece Paige (Lana Candor).
But that’s not to say the film is all schmaltz. Roadrunner still comes in, goes “meep meep,” and an anvil flattens someone. Whenever a character gets blown up, crushed, or sent flying, they brush themselves off and move on. The joke of Space Jam was that Michael Jordan never got used to it. Coyote vs. ACME is similar to Who Framed Roger Rabbit and Bob Hoskins’ interactions with ‘toons in that picture. While not written as broadly, the humans acknowledge their hybrid cartoon/live-action universe doesn’t behave like ours.
For those wondering if Coyote’s Looney Tunes costars appear, yes, they do. Foghorn Leghorn appears as ACME’s high-powered executive. Tweety’s a corporate informant, and Porky Pig, Daffy Duck, and Bugs Bunny all make cameos, sure to delight audiences. By leaning into paranoia thrillers like Michael Clayton and All the President’s Men, Coyote vs. ACME avoids the easy route of tackling a standard court drama. Adding Looney Tunes to a legal thriller offers a lot of riffs on paranoia, conspiracies, and the general stupidity of mega corporations. Honestly, we could use a lot more of Bugs and Daffy lampooning our current state of affairs.
The irony of Warner Bros. Discovery trying to squash a movie about corporations burying inconvenient things is that it turned Coyote’s legal battle into meta-commentary on the film’s existence. In doing so, they turned the film into a zeitgeist moment, bringing far more eyes to a project that might’ve died in anonymity as an HBO Max original. I enjoyed laughing at this film with an audience. People forget how cathartic it can be to watch a comedy with hundreds of people having a good time.
Coyote vs. ACME is a crowd-pleaser and a welcome reminder of how much we missed all of our favourite Looney Tunes characters.
