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The most feel-good story at the movies this year isn’t happening just on the screen. By virtue of merely playing out of cinema projectors, Dave Green’s Coyote vs. Acme feels like a miracle before even the title card; it’s a Cinderella story if Cinderella was a rabbit in a gown and wig doing their best Ingrid Bergman impression. In a world where movies like Batgirl have vanished forever inside a Warner Bros. vault to justify a corporate tax write-off, Coyote vs. Acme will be playing coast-to-coast on big screens across the country.
That is something to savor, as is both the online fan demand which made it happen and Ketchup Entertainment distributing the picture when Warner Bros. Discovery would not. So the reality that the Looney Tunes movie this all happened over is simply pretty good, is almost negligible. Pretty good is indeed quite marvelous in a world where the last Looney Tunes movie that WBD released under its own banner was the wretched synergetic slop of Space Jam: A New Legacy.
Unlike either Space Jam and so many other corporate mascot revivals, Coyote vs. Acme understands the appeal of these Looney Tunes characters and commits to the bit. So much so that I’m fairly positive the movie is set in New Mexico solely so that in the third act, when a character boards a plane, his pilot can announce, “Apologies for taking a wrong turn out of Albuquerque.” If you get the reference, you’re going to smile ear-to-ear like a tuxedo cat who caught the canary when watching Coyote vs. Acme. Or a coyote.
As the title suggests, Coyote vs. Acme is the story of one exasperated Wile E. Coyote and his decades-long quest to devour the Road Runner. The film goes so far as to open on a lovingly modernized variation of the classic Chuck Jones and Michael Maltese Road Runner cartoons, updated both in terms of live action (at least via the desert background vistas behind the animated coyote and road runner), as well as that when this Wile E. Coyote uses a magnet glove, it looks suspiciously like a Tom Cruise Mission: Impossible gadget. The thing even ends up flying him into the sky where he gets attached to a military jet’s Acme missile.
The glove is of course an Acme product to, as is everything Wile E. Coyote uses to catch the Road Runner. Alas, every device down to the last pair of rocket skates proves dysfunctional, backfiring and hurting the desert dog with one more violent indignity. It’s for this reason he eagerly takes up the command of a janky local law firm’s TV commercial to sue Acme for recompense. The law firm’s co-founder, Kevin Avery (Will Forte), is no crusader for the little guy, however. He’s a former Harvard Law alumni who has found himself comfortably washed out to bottom, filing small-ball claims against corporations that would happily rather settle for a few hundred dollars per accusation than deal with any serious litigation. And despite the idealism of his law school-studying niece, Paige Avery (Lana Condor), Kevin has no intention of really trying to hold the malfeasance of corporate America accountable.
Wile E. Coyote is a little more ambitious.
The canine will force his lawyer, kicking and screaming, to demand satisfaction for years of pain, humiliation, and hunger. Kevin will even come face-to-face with Acme’s high-priced legal team, including college nemesis Buddy Crane (John Cena) and the reigning rooster in the Acme hen house, Foghorn Leghorn. But the more Wile and Kevin dig into the company’s books, the more apparent a conspiracy exists that includes informants, missing celebrities, and corruption that goes all the way to Washington, D.C.
Right down to its title and the amusing bit where the film opens with a “Based on a True Story” title card, the cleverest thing about Coyote vs. Acme is how straight it plays its legal thriller trappings. The movie is a love letter to those who grew up watching Looney Tunes cartoons, yes, but it’s just as much a winking throwback to the kind of courtroom dramas and John Grisham potboilers which populated TNT when pint-sized millennials like a younger Dave Green were flipping between Looney Tunes on Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon.
These familiar beats in smoke-filled law offices and mahogany-encased halls of power gain an unexpected earnestness, too, thanks to the movie’s best live-action asset: Will Forte. A comedic character actor who never quite got his full due, even after an Oscar nomination for Nebraska and bragging rights for being your main man with the plan, MacGrubes, Forte pours deep pathos and insecurity into a middle-aged bloke who is terrified of one day gaining enough perspective to admit he became a loser somewhere along the way. There’s a needy pitifulness to the guy who, like the Coyote, never caught the grand prize he chased all his life.
It adds a foundation of sweetness to the film that gives the intentionally arch courtside melodrama something approaching substance. It also, perhaps less warmly, ends up the stronger half to a dramedy that struggles with the zany comedic elements that should be the core of the film.
Green and his screenwriters Samy Burch—working from a story by James Gunn and Jeremy Slater, who in turn got the idea from a satirical article of the same name by Ian Frazier in an issue of The New Yorker—reveal an unmistakable wealth of affection and knowledge for the Looney Tunes cartoons of yore. The first animated character we meet in their movie looks suspiciously like Peter Lorre, the Golden Age Hollywood character actor who was once a favorite face to caricature and homage in the 1940s Warner Bros. animation department. And all of the animated denizens of Coyote vs. Acme’s Albuquerque offer familiar winking asides to their iconography’s history.
The way they are woven into the larger legal framework, however, is more bemusing than it is uproarious, regularly inviting a wry smirk but never a belly laugh guffaw. The movie seems set 90 years down the line in the same world as the sublime Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, where toons and humans live side by side, but the cartoons remain akin to second class citizens—albeit nowadays a few of them, like Foghorn and other cameos, have risen to greater levels of prestige by the time Coyote has rolled around. But Roger Rabbit was more than just an ingenious melding of film noir tropes with cartoon icons; it also translated the anarchy of Chuck Jones, Tex Avery, et al. to a film that included Bob Hoskins as a grizzled gumshoe who knew how to go wacky and join the circus.
By comparison, Coyote vs. Acme gets so enmeshed in its legal thriller setup, it forgets the gonzo glee that should be in the punchline. A bit like an actual New Yorker joke, it impresses the mind, but the humor never quite spreads to the gut (or heart) despite some rather elaborate set pieces in the third act.
Nonetheless, Coyote vs. Acme is a marvel in its own right. Like a much-aggrieved coyote, it deserves to be championed rather than henpecked for not being the perfect witness. Not since the days of Roger Rabbit on the big screen, and perhaps Steven Spielberg-produced series like Tiny Toons and Animaniacs on the small screen in the early ‘90s, has anyone so clearly understood the appeal of these Looney Tunes treasures. And like their onscreen characters, the filmmakers had to fight, dodge, and legally wrangle the impossible in corporate America to get their story out into the world. Despite caveats and quibbles, it is a compelling testimonial that earns its day in the sun.
For once, it feels great to see the little guy catch his road runner.
Coyote vs. Acme opens in theaters on Friday, Aug. 28.
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