Thank God it’s finally here
There’s a joke hanging over pretty much every second of Coyote vs. Acme that the filmmakers could never have planned.
It spotlights good ol’ Wile E. Coyote, the long-suffering victim of a huge corporation, Acme, which makes all sorts of products that, while advertised with great fanfare, are in fact defective and tend to cause maximum harm to our hero.
And Warner Bros. tried to bury it. You almost couldn’t write it.
The film was completed in 2023, but Warner Bros. decided not to release it, instead planning to use it as a $30m tax write-off. It joined a growing list of nearly finished films that’d been dumped as part of cost-cutting measures at Warner Bros. Discovery. It was eventually shopped around and picked up by Ketchup Entertainment.
And the most baffling thing about the whole saga is just how good it is.
I didn’t expect this to be good. Not good in a “well, at least it’s not a complete disaster” kind of way. Not an interesting curiosity rescued from a studio vault. It’s genuinely funny, inventive, warm and, most importantly, feels like it was made by people who actually understand why the Looney Tunes have survived for nearly a century.
It’s totally insane that someone watched this movie and decided no one should ever get to see it.
The premise itself is brilliant.
Finally, after all these years of failed attempts at catching the Road Runner, Wile E. Coyote has had enough. The endless stream of defective products from the Acme Corporation, including all the rockets, magnets, Rube Goldberg machines and anvils used in his attempts to catch the bird, has finally taken its toll. In the end, it’s not the Road Runner that causes Wile E. problems, but the Acme Corporation and its seemingly endless supply of defective products.
So he does the only reasonable thing left. He lawyers up.
The Coyote is represented by struggling personal injury attorney Kevin Avery (Will Forte). As the case starts to gain traction, he’s up against the large and powerful Acme Corporation, represented by the smarmy and self-assured Buddy Crane (John Cena). Director Dave Green weaves the simple premise of a lawsuit into something that’s part courtroom comedy and part conspiracy film, told through the lens of a classic Looney Tunes short.
That sounds like it could be an absolute mess. Sometimes it very nearly is.
The movie actually understands that you’re allowed to be silly. Properly silly.
Coyote vs. Acme is a completely cartoonish movie from beginning to end.
The characters are squished at random times, and lots of things explode for completely arbitrary reasons. The plans to try and capture the Road Runner are increasingly and absurdly complex, and they all fail in very silly ways. As for the laws of physics, they can be whatever’s needed to move the plot along.
And that’s exactly what a Looney Tunes movie should do.
There’ve been plenty of attempts to turn the Looney Tunes into feature films, like Space Jam and Looney Tunes: Back in Action. Space Jam was a huge cultural phenomenon. I love it. It’s completely, utterly and fantastically insane. Looney Tunes: Back in Action was another great Looney Tunes film. But for the most part, Hollywood has struggled to work out what to do with these characters on the big screen.
They’re too chaotic. Too violent. Too weird.
These aren’t really the characteristics you normally build a movie around. Wile E. Coyote wants to eat a bird. The bird runs away. The Coyote builds something unbelievably dangerous. It goes wrong.
Repeat forever.
Coyote vs. Acme doesn’t try to fix that.
Instead, it asks what happens if you take that absurdity completely seriously.
Wile E. Coyote must have a pretty good case after decades of being harmed by Acme products, while Acme has been happily selling them to him all along.
A wonderfully stupid idea has been made even better by the addition of a courtroom drama to the mix.
For the most part, the main character, Wile E. Coyote, is left the same as he was in the cartoons. He’s silent and gets his point across with expressions, signs and gestures. In the courtroom, Kevin Avery essentially acts as his voice.
And Wile E. might secretly be the reason the whole thing works.
There’s something strangely sad about Wile E. He’s never given up. Every time he fails at one of his plans to catch the Road Runner, he comes back for more.
This poor bastard never stops trying.
We’ve seen Wile E. fail over and over again for decades. We know that every time he comes up with a plan, it’s going to end in failure. The Road Runner is going to escape, and Wile E. is going to get hurt. Again. Somewhere deep down, I imagine Wile E. knows this too.
But the next morning, a large package arrives at Wile E.’s doorstep containing another product from Acme, and he proceeds to assemble yet another contraption to capture the Road Runner.
There’s something strangely admirable about that.
And the film doesn’t overplay this either. Instead of some grand speech explaining how Wile E. Coyote represents the best of the human spirit, we’re allowed to simply get used to Wile E. in this new context.
The film just lets you spend time with him.
It’s quite an achievement that the film manages to make you root for a character whose main objective is the attempted murder of another beloved cartoon character.
Will Forte is pretty much the perfect human actor to put beside him.
Will Forte’s Kevin Avery is the straight man to the Coyote in Coyote vs. Acme. He’s a vaguely pathetic, out-of-his-depth yet enormously likeable character. A perfect Forte type for him to play around with. Forte’s take on a straight man is several miles away from the likes of, say, Ron Burgundy or MacGruber.
John Cena, meanwhile, knows precisely what film he’s in.
One of John Cena’s greatest qualities as a comedian is that he’s able to look completely ridiculous and still act as if nothing unusual is going on. In his portrayal of Buddy Crane, a corporate lawyer, he feels like exactly the kind of villain Wile E. Coyote would recognise, just made of flesh and blood rather than ink and paint.
Cena goes big. Thankfully, everyone else does too.
That’s another thing Coyote vs. Acme gets right: the live-action actors don’t feel like celebrities stuck in the cartoon world.
They feel like cartoon characters themselves.
Coyote vs. Acme also isn’t an attempt to remake Who Framed Roger Rabbit. The interactions between the humans and cartoon characters are fun, and the film exists in a universe where they simply co-exist. However, it doesn’t attempt to build the kind of fully realised 1940s Hollywood world that Who Framed Roger Rabbit did.
There are times when the plot becomes overly complicated as Kevin Avery’s case against Acme Corporation develops into a huge conspiracy that involves everyone at Acme. At times, the film feels like it’s stretching a great premise for a 75–80-minute comedy into a 100-minute film, and it does start to drag.
More importantly, the cartoon sequences are very good.
There’s a tactile quality to the cartoon sequences in the live-action settings. The slapstick is really well done. You feel the impact of Wile E. hitting the wall. Half the comedy of the elaborate contraptions falling apart is seeing the mechanics of the disaster unfold before everything collapses.
Good slapstick is basically engineering.
You have to see how the trap is supposed to work before enjoying exactly how spectacularly it doesn’t.
And Coyote vs. Acme gets that.
It also doesn’t treat its Looney Tunes history like a checklist of references designed to make an audience point at the screen.
References to other Looney Tunes characters are scattered throughout the film. In fact, the entire film is based around some of the most recognisable cartoons ever created. However, there’s a big difference between using recognisable characters for the sake of it and really understanding them enough to use them naturally. Coyote vs. Acme mostly falls on the right side of that divide.
It feels affectionate rather than corporate.
Which brings us back to Warner Bros.
Because of what happened to this movie, it’s almost impossible to watch Coyote vs. Acme without being reminded of what happened after it was finished.
A movie about a seemingly invincible company that can do whatever it likes to an individual was itself almost thrown in the trash by a massive corporation. The irony is difficult to ignore.
A story about Wile E. Coyote refusing to accept defeat survived because the people who made it refused to accept defeat.
It’s worth noting that the film was eventually ‘rescued’ by another distributor from the clutches of Warner Bros. The writers obviously could never have planned for the real-life story of the film to mirror their fictional one quite so closely.
The release story of Coyote vs. Acme would be fascinating in itself even if the finished film was terrible.
But that’s what makes all of this so much stranger.
They nearly buried a really good one.
It’s not a masterpiece that’s going to change the face of animation. Now and again it’s a bit of a mess, occasionally it’s too much of a good thing, and in places it drags on a bit.
But it feels like a film written by real people. So many big-screen family films can feel like they’ve been shaped by a committee. This doesn’t. It feels like someone had an original idea — a slightly odd one, admittedly — and was allowed to follow it through.
What if Wile E. Coyote sued Acme?
That’s the movie. No multiverse. No attempt to reinvent the Looney Tunes as brooding superheroes. No desperately engineered cinematic universe.
Just a coyote, his lawyer and several decades’ worth of extremely questionable mail-order purchases.
The movie is funny, charming and inventive. It includes all the TNT and falling anvils you’d hope for from a Looney Tunes movie, and somehow it’s also quite moving.
Most importantly, it remembers what makes the Looney Tunes so great. They’re anarchic. They’re ridiculous.
And however many times you blow them up, flatten them or throw them off the side of a mountain, they always come back.
As it turns out, so did Coyote vs. Acme.
Meep meep.
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Tom Baker
I like Star Wars, heavy metal and BBQ Pringles.
