With ‘Coyote Vs. Acme,’ WB Drops the Anvil

It really shouldn’t have been this hard to get a movie as delightful and wackily hilarious as Coyote Vs. Acme into the theaters. But in 2023, after the movie was complete, Warner Brothers decided to shelve the picture as a tax write-off. Rumors leaked that WB had stupidly kept the public from seeing a masterwork, so protests erupted online. The studio put the property up for bid, someone bought it, and now, at the end of August, the distributor has dumped Coyote Vs. Acme into neighborhood cinemas where people can find it if they look hard enough.

A masterwork, it’s not. But, at a mere $70 million, Coyote Vs. Acme is still one of the year’s funniest movies, with an Oscar-worthy animated performance from, of all characters, Wile E. Coyote himself, who the script treats as a protagonist worthy of our sympathy, mockery, pity, and amusement all at once. It does for Looney Tunes what Who Framed Roger Rabbit? did for Disney, perhaps a little more on the cheap, but also with maximum hilarity. It’s the best human-animation hybrid movie in decades.

Our screenwriters, director, and James Gunn (who produced the movie), loosely adapted a classic old Ian Frazier New Yorker humor piece, but expanded Coyote Vs. Acme into a systematic deconstruction and reconstruction of the WB Looney Tunes mythos. It most resembles The Lego Movie and The Lego Batman Movie in its love for the source material, but also in its recognition of the source material’s absurdity.

After a cold open starring, if you can believe it, an animated Peter Lorre, the movie begins, as it should, with an elaborately hilarious sequence where the Coyote tries (and fails, yet again) to catch his nemesis, the Roadrunner, for dinner. After disaster, he retreats back to his cave, where he sees an infomercial for Kevin an Albuquerque personal-injury attorney, played by Will Forte, who represents cartoon characters in petty cases against the Acme Corporation. The Albuquerque lawyer is a sly allusion to both Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, but is mostly an opportunity for the movie to offer its own take on the classic Bugs Bunny line, “I must have taken a wrong toin at Alberquoike!”

This prompts another lunatic scheme to bloom in the coyote’s mind, as he only ever thinks about one thing: Catching that Road Runner.

Coyote Vs. Acme ★★★ (3/5 stars)
Directed by: Dave Green
Written by: Samy Burch, James Gunn, Jeremy Slater
Starring: Wile E. Coyote, Will Forte, John Cena, Lana Condor
Running time: X mins

We then see a New Mexico mostly populated by people, but also by Warner Brothers characters, who are constantly blasting through rooftops, walking through walls, or dodging airborne pianos, or having sticks of dynamite blow up in their faces, only to get right back up again with minimal injury. The entire universe is a Rube Goldberg scenario bent on their destruction.

The plot of the movie, and I don’t think I’m giving much away by saying this, is that the Acme Corporation, run, essentially, by Foghorn Leghorn and John Cena, is experimenting its faulty and destructive products on helpless cartoon characters so it can then develop useful, non-harmful products for its human clients. In a reference that’s probably smarter than the audience for this movie itself, they call this the Sisyphus Project.

Through it all, the Coyote stalks, scheming. He never speaks — communicating by signs — but is constantly plotting, hungry, and hilarious. He gets all the best jokes, all the best signs (a limited number of signs, as he says), and all the best hand and eye gestures. Other than Foghorn Leghorn, who appears often, and Tweety Bird, who’s become a lackey of Acme for plot reasons, and the Road Runner, who is around often enough, the rest of the Looney Tunes gang remains mostly a rumor. Daffy Duck, the greatest character in all American fiction, makes brief appearances and has one spectacular scene. Bugs Bunny is largely absent. Porky Pig has a couple of brief jokes about not wearing pants, and Elmer Fudd appears as a Senator in a D.C. hearing. But other Looney Tunes favorites, like Yosemite Sam and Pepe LePew, barely appear at all.

Instead, we get a lot of Will Forte’s aimless mugging as the lawyer. He does what he can with insane material, and is certainly game to be attacked like a cartoon character, but he’s not the most magnetic screen presence. Cena is extremely generic, and, other than one scene where he banters with Tweety, not particularly funny. The other human characters barely register at all. That, along with a third act that drags and also shouts, too often, “I am a screenplay,” keep Coyote Vs. Acme from being some sort of weird masterpiece.

But it’s out of the vault. It’s mostly fun, and gives the Looney Tunes the exact modern reboot they need. Just watch the skies for falling anvils.