Director: Dave Green
Stars: Will Forte, Lana Condor, John Cena
Writing about movies vocationally – blogging in the year of our lord 2026 – can feel like a Sisyphean act. Each new movie another opportunity to try and capture and quantify, in words, the ineffable. And to what end? For who? I have periods where I feel like it isn’t worth doing. But then, in the great words of Vin Diesel, “the movies”. I guess it’s a labor of love. Even if it is a folly.
Getting Coyote vs. Acme out into the world must’ve seemed like a Sisyphean act, also. Certainly in terms of effort yielding circumspect results. From early development circa 2018 to initial completion in 2023, the film was infamously scuppered by Warner Bros. as part of a tax write-off, and it seemed as though it would never see the light of day. It’s arrival in cinemas now, nearly three years later and via altogether different distributors (Altitude in the UK) seems so improbable. An underdog winning out. Which has gifted Dave Green’s movie a wealth of goodwill. What’s even more improbable – and incredible – is how pertinent all of this is to the finished product itself. A live action/cartoon hybrid par excellence that is fundamentally about exposed corporate swindling and the unfair outcomes of their monopolies.
From a sparklingly funny script by Samy Burch (of May December (!)) and wryly branding itself as ‘Based on a True Story’, Coyote vs. Acme takes place in a universe where humans and cartoons live side-by-side, with corporate giant Acme providing tailored products for all – and acting as an identifiable stand-in for the likes of Amazon, Google, Apple and more. The Looney Tunes adventures of Wile E. Coyote and his unrelenting efforts to capture the Road Runner are real, but have taken their toll on Coyote, who comes to realise that Acme’s deficient products are the main cause of his many, many failures. Incensed, he seeks out small-time Albuquerque lawyer Kevin Avery (Will Forte) to help him claim damages, not just for one instance, but for all his misfortunes.
Avery is used to settling. His very business is a form of settlement; modest in scale, modest in ambition. Coyote wryly cons him into a major case, pitted against imposing corporate lawyer Buddy Crane (John Cena). To borrow from another famous Albuquerque-set IP, if Avery is a Saul Goodman-type, Crane is a Howard Hamlin. Weary and sceptical, Avery sets out to find his only hope at making a case; key-witness Road Runner. But how hard can catching a Road Runner be?
Since a brief craze in the wake of Who Framed Roger Rabbit? at the tail-end of the 1980s, the call for such crossover capers has been conspicuously absent, making this feel like something of an oddity in our cinematic landscape but, thanks to it’s crackingly high hitting gag ratio, an exceedingly welcome one, and particularly a balm in the face of so many blandly identikit CG toons. Back in the day (showing my age), Looney Tunes was always the slightly more anarchic choice when set beside it’s Disney counterparts. A shade wittier, more satirical.
Burch and director Green – along with the human cast and of course the animators – nail the sense of volatile slapstick with a success ratio rarely seen in modern Hollywood comedies (aside, perhaps, from the similarly unexpected Naked Gun reboot). But they also understand the satirical edge, and take to task corporate America’s faceless multi-billion dollar enterprises. When Acme prides itself on being “A company of family values that values it’s family of companies” the business-for-business megalomaniacal sociopathy is ironically exposed. Going further, one might also read the movie’s cartoon characters as substitutes for minorities, exploited for profit through harmful consumer testing.
What unfurls is consistently funny. An early re-introduction to the classic dynamic between Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner acts as a functional showcase for the blending of animation and live action, and while there have been a few tweaks to the look and feel of the characters, the rascal ingenuity and successfully paid-off set-ups reassure us that we’re in safe, familiar territory that honours those glory days. But rather than play out as a brash, crassly pandering modernisation aimed squarely at pre-teens whose feet don’t scrape the cinema floor, Coyote vs Acme turns into a doolally remix of the legal conspiracy thriller, casting Bugs Bunny as a Deep Throat-style character (“Have you been… Bugged?”) and Tweety Pie as a shady, contracted heavy. When ultimately presented with Elmer Fudd as the head of a senate sub-committee, one is forced to ponder… is Fudd starting to look like Sean Penn, or is it the other way around?
Forte is a smart choice to hang this all around. A comic talent who often shines in an underdog role, he acts as well with his filled-in animated co-stars as he does with his human ones, particularly the slightly underserved Lana Condor as his plucky niece and assistant Paige. For his part, few have mastered the smug, shit-eating grin like Cena. At it’s best, Coyote vs. Acme‘s courtroom scenes evoke the same silliness as the Coens circa Intolerable Cruelty. Out in the world, the light blend of animated elements with live-action stunt work provides a battery of hugely enjoyable scraps and misadventures.
Acme brand Wile E. a ‘high usage user’, implying a carefully, deliberately cultivated society of consumer addicts, while simultaneously downplaying the material harm of their actions. It’s a wildly anti-capitalist play from a movie intended to wave the banner for WB, and suddenly the decision to detonate it’s commercial potential seems a little less coincidental. But who’s to say? Certainly not me. As the movie glaringly identifies, waging legal battles with corporate giants is a financially discriminating endeavour. Not me, sir.
Toward the end, another surprise layer reveals itself. Communicating with one another via a ‘Little Number of Signs’, Coyote and Road Runner (both, mercifully, remaining mute) have an exchange of existential significance. Without Coyote to pursue… ‘him’ (I always thought of the Road Runner as female, so that was a personal reset)… Road Runner’s sense of purpose has been shaken. Like so many tales, the relationship between protagonist and antagonist is a complex two-way street… even if one is simply trying to hit the other with an anvil while the other dodges. The discovery is bizarrely moving in ways I can’t quite qualify.
All of which is to say, this is a blast. Easily the best thing baring James Gunn’s name (story and producer credits) and another (blue) feather in Burch’s cap, run don’t walk to a multiplex to show those foolish bosses it was worth the bankroll after all. Beep beep.
And me? I’ll just keep on writing. For better or worse it’s what I know, after all.
The Lost Highway Hotel 