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Review: COYOTE VS. ACME is So Damn Fun It’s Insane Warner Bros. Tried to Blow it Up
I can’t believe we almost lost Coyote vs. Acme . Seriously, Warner Bros. looked at this ridiculously entertaining, laugh-out-loud Looney Tunes movie and somehow decided the best place for it was a corporate graveyard disguised as a tax write-off. Having now watched the finished film with a theater full of people laughing, clapping, and cheering, that whole situation feels even more insane. This movie is an absolute blast! It’s goofy, fast, wonderfully stupid when it wants to be, surprisingly heartfelt when it needs to be, and packed with exactly the kind of cartoon insanity I wanted from a Looney Tunes movie. I’m so happy that Ketchup Entertainment stepped in to rescue the movie after the fans and filmmakers refused to let the movie disappear, because this thing deserved a theatrical release. More importantly, it deserved an audience. Sitting there watching Wile E. Coyote finally command the big screen while the crowd around me completely ate it up was such a damn good time. After everything this movie went through, getting to experience it in a theater almost feels like watching the Coyote finally catch the Road Runner. Almost. The wonderfully ridiculous hook of Coyote vs. Acme is that after roughly 75 years of being blown up, crushed, launched off cliffs, flattened, roasted, catapulted into mountains, and otherwise physically humiliated by defective Acme products, Wile E. Coyote has finally had enough. Instead of ordering another rocket, anvil, giant magnet, or whatever suicidal contraption comes in the next cardboard box, he gets himself a lawyer and sues Acme. It’s such a perfect evolution of the classic Road Runner cartoons that I’m amazed it took this long for somebody to turn it into a movie. Will Forte plays Kevin Avery, a struggling attorney who has made a modest career securing settlements for cartoon characters injured by Acme products. His little law firm, Avery, Jones and Maltese, is itself a great geeky nod to Looney Tunes legends Tex Avery, Chuck Jones, and Michael Maltese. Kevin eventually agrees to represent Wile E. in his massive case against Acme, putting him opposite his old law-school rival Buddy Crane, played with wonderfully obnoxious corporate confidence by John Cena . Lana Condor joins the fight as Kevin’s idealistic niece Paige, and suddenly we’ve got a courtroom comedy built around one of animation’s greatest running jokes. What really made me happy is how completely director Dave Green and writers Samy Burch , James Gunn , and Jeremy Slater understand these characters and the wonderfully demented universe they inhabit. The filmmakers aren’t embarrassed by Looney Tunes. They don’t feel the need to make everything sarcastically cool or apologize for the silliness. They embrace it! Wile E. Coyote is fantastic. He’s obsessive, overconfidently determined, and oddly dignified despite spending most of his existence getting his ass handed to him by physics and cartoon physics. He’s also incredibly lovable. The animation preserves the classic 2D personality of these characters while allowing them to exist convincingly alongside the human cast, and watching Wile E. physically interact with the real world is a ton of fun. Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Foghorn Leghorn, Tweety, Porky Pig, Yosemite Sam, and plenty of other familiar faces work their way into the madness, sometimes only appearing long enough to fire off a gag and disappear. Even the legal dialogue gets infected with cartoon logic. When Wile E.’s lack of employment threatens his claim for lost wages, Kevin fires back, “The ruling in Sylvester v. Gonzales clearly establishes pursuit as a legitimate professional occupation.” The movie also understands something important about Looney Tunes comedy... it has to MOVE. Coyote vs. Acme keeps firing visual jokes, background gags, animation references, character cameos, physical comedy, courtroom absurdity, and escalating Acme destruction at you without turning the whole thing into exhausting noise. I laughed a lot, and hearing the audience around me cracking up made it even better. There’s an infectious communal quality to this kind of comedy when it works. The creative team does a great job setting up the gags. You know the rhythm, you’ve probably known it since you were a kid. Yet these filmmakers still find ways to make that familiar setup funny. It reminded me why these characters have survived for generations. They don’t require elaborate mythology or endless explanations. Sometimes you just need a determined coyote, a catastrophically unreliable piece of equipment, and gravity waiting patiently nearby. Then Coyote vs. Acme pulls something on me that I seriously wasn’t expecting when it got emotional. What the hell? I came here to watch Wile E. get obliterated by mail-order weaponry, and suddenly I’m thinking about friendship, purpose, rejection, loneliness, and what happens when the thing you’ve spent your entire life pursuing becomes part of your identity. There’s genuine sweetness buried beneath all the cartoon violence, particularly in the film’s ideas about relationships and the strange ways people can give one another purpose. Wile E. and the Road Runner obviously aren’t going to grab coffee and exchange friendship bracelets, but their relationship means something. One exists in pursuit of the other, and the movie finds something unexpectedly touching inside that ridiculous dynamic. The human story doesn’t land with quite the same force for me at every turn, and there are moments where the movie’s emotional ambitions compete with its desire to launch another cartoon character through a wall. Still, I’d rather watch a movie swing for that emotional connection than treat these characters like corporate mascots being marched around for recognition applause. There’s actual affection here. I also kept thinking about Who Framed Roger Rabbit? while watching this. That 1988 classic remains the gold standard for combining live-action filmmaking with traditional cartoon characters, and Coyote vs. Acme doesn’t knock it off that throne. But damn, it gets closer to capturing that particular kind of magic than I expected. The animation feels alive. The human performers commit to the ridiculous reality around them. The cartoon characters feel like characters rather than digital decorations. Most importantly, the movie remembers that audiences actually love these weirdos. There’s nostalgia here, obviously, but the film isn’t surviving purely on nostalgia. It takes the familiar Acme mythology and finds a genuinely clever story inside it, one that can poke fun at corporations, lawyers, intellectual property, consumer culture, and the absurdity of an institution repeatedly selling dangerous garbage to the same customer for decades. There are pieces in the film that could’ve been tightened, and not every joke hits with the same force, but I was having far too much fun to spend the movie keeping a ledger of minor complaints. Mostly, I walked out of Coyote vs. Acme happy that I actually got to see the damn thing. That shouldn’t feel remarkable, but considering this movie was finished, shelved, targeted as a tax write-off, fought over, rallied around, rescued, and finally put in theaters, watching it with an enthusiastic audience felt special. Green and his team of artists took characters I’ve loved since I was a kid and gave them a theatrical adventure filled with great animation, wonderfully bonkers comedy, genuine heart, and enough Acme-engineered destruction to make any insurance company spontaneously combust. This movie absolutely has the ingredients to become the kind of family cult favorite people keep rediscovering for years. Warner Bros. nearly threw Coyote vs. Acme off a cliff and blew it up. Somehow, like Wile E. himself, the movie survived the fall. I’m so freakin’ glad it did.
