Review: Coyote vs Acme

There is something wonderfully appropriate about Coyote vs. Acme surviving its own seemingly certain demise. Wile E. Coyote has spent decades being crushed by boulders, blown up by dynamite, flattened against canyon walls, and launched into the stratosphere, only to dust himself off and try again. Warner Bros. tried to do something similar to his movie, shelving the completed film as a tax write-off before it was eventually rescued for release. If any character was built to survive corporate annihilation, it was probably this one.

Thankfully, the movie is more than a curiosity that escaped the vault. Coyote vs. Acme is funny, energetic, surprisingly sweet, and most importantly understands why the Looney Tunes have endured. Director Dave Green doesn't try to reinvent these characters or apologize for their cartoonishness. He simply gives them a bigger sandbox to destroy.

The wonderfully ridiculous premise finds Wile E. Coyote finally realizing that maybe the problem isn't him. After decades of purchasing defective rockets, catapults, explosives, magnets, dehydrated boulders, and whatever other dangerous nonsense Acme has shipped to his desert mailbox, Coyote decides to sue the company. His attorney is Kevin Avery (Will Forte), a struggling lawyer who sees the case as both an opportunity for redemption and a chance to take on his former boss, Buddy Crane (John Cena), the intimidating attorney representing Acme. It is exactly the kind of premise that should power a Looney Tunes movie: take something inherently absurd completely seriously.

The screenplay finds a surprising amount of mileage in treating Coyote's endless suffering like evidence in a product liability lawsuit. Old cartoons essentially become exhibits demonstrating decades of corporate negligence, and there is something inherently funny about applying boring legal logic to a universe where someone can paint a tunnel onto the side of a mountain and watch another character drive through it.

Green also understands that Coyote himself shouldn't suddenly become a chatterbox. His expressions, signs, diagrams, and exhausted physicality remain his language. There is genuine pathos in watching this perpetually abused creature finally wonder whether the system might be rigged against him. That sounds like an absurd amount of thematic weight to place on Wile E. Coyote, but the movie wisely never forgets the joke underneath it.

Cena gets the louder role and clearly enjoys himself. He has become remarkably comfortable playing variations on enormous men who don't realize how ridiculous they are, and Buddy allows him to lean into that comic arrogance. His exaggerated confidence fits naturally beside characters who regularly survive falling anvils.

Not everything works. Some of the familiar Looney Tunes appearances also feel more like obligatory cameos than inspired additions. But the movie repeatedly recovers because the filmmakers understand something basic that far more expensive attempts at exploiting familiar intellectual property forget: these characters are funny.

The sight gags have setups and payoffs. The slapstick understands timing. Animation and live action interact with enough physical imagination that the cartoons feel like anarchic intruders rather than digital mascots pasted into the frame. Most refreshingly, the movie doesn't treat Looney Tunes as something that needs to be modernized through winking irony. It trusts exploding birdseed, oversized magnets, ridiculous signs, and gravity itself to still get laughs.

That makes the strange journey of Coyote vs. Acme feel even more fitting. This is a movie about a little guy repeatedly destroyed by a giant corporation that considers him disposable, somehow emerging from the wreckage for another shot.

You couldn't script a better joke.

4/5