By In entertainment industry circles, the sentiment towards Dave Green’s looney legal thriller is aggressively positive. Shelved by Warner Discovery for a tax write-off in 2023, COYOTE VS. ACME became a martyr representing the working-class craftspeople devalued and displaced by corporate mergers. The story, which follows Wile E. Coyote’s lawsuit against shady megacorporation ACME, has become eerily relevant entirely by accident. Much of the online and in-person protests to the cancellation center around the prospect of Warner Discovery fumbling a potential megahit. Any writer or director in Green’s orbit who laid eyes on the film correctly assessed it as a wildly clever riff on the classic Looney Tunes characters. It does not patronize its audience. In fact, it actively expects that they will follow along with the twisty mystery and lengthy courtroom showdowns. Every single grown-up in my AMC Early Access showing, myself included, was completely gleeful watching this. There’s just one problem. I did not hear a child laugh even a single time.
I have spent years advocating for more intelligent kids movies. We are inundated with MINECRAFTs and SONICs that cynically feast on the poor attention spans of a generation raised by iPads. Literacy is at an all time low, so film has become even more important as a medium to teach critical thinking via entertainment. However, I’m not sure if the old-world sensibility of the 96-year-old Looney Tunes property is going to break through the noise. Kids who are already interested in movies may latch onto the film’s slapstick humor and madcap action, but will likely trail off once we enter the courtroom or the halls of Congress. After all, they couldn’t care less about the subliminal meaning COYOTE VS. ACME has taken on. They’ll just wonder why they aren’t watching SPIDER-VERSE again. My advice: allow yourself to embrace your youthful urges and take this in as the niche adult comedy that it is. You will have a better time if you can marvel at the wondrous execution of this story while deciding for yourself if the little ones would complain the whole time while watching it.
Wile E. Coyote has grown tired of his decades-long crusade to catch the Road Runner. Determined to put ACME on blast for their faulty hunting equipment, he hires billboard lawyer Kevin Avery (Will Forte) to sue them. Kevin has spent years lazily settling these cases with other cartoon clients and small payouts. His only slight motivation to try harder comes from his idealistic, Ivy-League-graduate niece Paige (Lana Condor), who is interning for him. With the future of the firm on the line, Kevin goes head to head with ACME’s big-shot defense attorney and Buddy Crane (John Cena), his former law school classmate. Initially, the proceedings are disastrous, but the firm eventually does stumble upon an eerie conspiracy that just might be enough to get the upper hand.
The screenplay by Samy Burch (MAY DECEMBER) takes every character, both human and animated, as seriously as one can within the framework of this deeply silly film. It is no easy task to craft a dynamic between a silent animal protagonist who communicates via a “limited number of signs” and his somewhat unlikable human accomplice. Thankfully, Will Forte completely commits to this absurd mission. He’s often as cartoonishly bumbling as Wile E., finding himself the target of several cleverly choreographed pratfalls. Yet, he always ensures that Kevin feels like an average joe coasting through life. In some aspects it is Forte’s most grounded screen performance to date, dispensing with the SNL smugness that can make him a chore to watch. It helps that he’s opposite the bubbly Lana Condor, who contrasts the more cynical qualities that might’ve made Kevin insufferable. Meanwhile, the Coyote balances out our ragtag crew perfectly. His self-satisfied deception is balanced out by his lack of noisiness. We cannot help but worry about him a little when he’s in danger and those eyes get extra big. Plus, we do get an unexpected bit of insight into his strange emotional connection with both Kevin and the Road Runner, so he’s never just shallow comic relief.
Our punchable villains also deliver the goods. John Cena has a blast as the brutish boys’ club bully. He plays Buddy’s nastiness totally deadpan. We completely believe that he’d torment any of our beloved Toons in order to win. He wisely allows Foghorn Leghorn (Eric Bauza, also voicing the vast majority of the animated characters) to be the scenery chewer as one of ACME’s higher ups. Leghorn’s unapologetic greed serves as a strangely poignant commentary about how those from marginalized groups can rise up to oppress their own if corrupted by power.
Dave Green augments the film’s social consciousness with kinetic direction that keeps everything moving at a lightning-fast pace. The slapstick set pieces are consistently inventive, bolstered by Brandon Trost’s impressive cinematography that bends the possibilities of what hand-drawn and realistic spaces can achieve in tandem. It never feels like we’re watching two separate worlds poorly cobbled together. When Wile E. starts a fire in ACME’s offices, we feel as though the people inside could get burned. Cartoon pianos and anvils crush real objects with tangible weight. Whenever the human and animated characters scuffle, it never feels like the actors are reacting to nothing in front of them. Everyone is completely immersed in this world.
COYOTE VS. ACME achieves the insurmountable task of telling a culturally relevant story with these nearly century-old characters. It’s a film that proudly embraces its vintage tone and humor, a perfect sensibility for a brewing cult classic. Those are the expectations that should be placed on it. The theatrical release in itself is the triumph against Warner Discovery’s anti-art practices. Best case scenario, this will prove that adult animation does not have to be crass and edgy in order to engage that audience. That in itself would be a win—I’m so tired of RICK AND MORTY.
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