'Coyote vs. Acme' review: The best 'Looney Tunes' movie in years and you almost didn't see it
- Nate Adams
- 11 minutes ago
- 6 min read
Courtesy of Ketchup Entertainment
Much has been said about the saga of “Coyote vs. Acme,” and much of it has been heavily publicized, but in case you’ve been living under a rock, or more appropriately, an anvil, let me briefly rehash the details. When Warner Bros. Discovery began taking an axe to the studio’s development slate in 2023, several completed or nearly completed movies became casualties as the company pursued tax write-offs and other cost-cutting measures. “Batgirl,” an animated “Scooby-Doo” holiday adventure and, yes, “Coyote vs. Acme” were all sent to purgatory, seemingly destined to never be seen by the public despite the work already poured into them.
The decisions were met with considerable outcry, particularly because of the precedent they represented. Hundreds of people could conceive, write, shoot and finish a movie only for that work to essentially cease to exist because somebody staring at a spreadsheet decided it was more valuable as a write-off. It’s ironic, then, that “Coyote vs. Acme,” of all the movies caught in that mess, was the one that persevered and eventually made its way to the big screen, because its story is almost perfectly emblematic of the situation in which the movie itself became trapped.
This is, after all, a movie about Wile E. Coyote taking on the enormous corporation that has spent years selling him defective products, only for “Coyote vs. Acme” to wind up fighting for its own existence against an enormous corporation. That real-world context gives the movie an added layer nobody involved could have possibly anticipated when they made it, but the best part about finally seeing “Coyote vs. Acme” is discovering that it never needed the controversy to make it worth saving. Director Dave Green has made the best Looney Tunes movie in years, a wonderfully silly live action/cartoon hybrid that understands the anarchic appeal of these characters while finding an undeniable sweetness in a story about standing up for yourself when the odds are stacked against you.
Based on Ian Frazier’s 1990 New Yorker piece and co-written by DSC studio head James Gunn, Jeremy Slater and Samy Burch, “Coyote vs. Acme” imagines Wile E. Coyote finally getting fed up with the Acme Corporation after decades of its products malfunctioning in his pursuit of the Road Runner. Rocket-powered roller skates, ultra-powerful magnets, enormous slingshots, catapults and countless other contraptions have routinely backfired, exploded or otherwise left Coyote flattened, scorched and no closer to catching his white whale.
Tired of taking the brunt of Acme’s faulty products, Coyote hires low-rent personal injury attorney Kevin Avery (a perfectly smarmy Will Forte), a lawyer accustomed to settling quickly, collecting a check and getting out before ever stepping foot inside a courtroom. Coyote has bigger ambitions and wants to take Acme all the way, forcing Kevin and his whip-smart assistant Paige (Lana Condor) to go toe-to-toe with the corporation’s high-powered attorney Buddy Crane (John Cena, yucking it up with exactly the right amount of cartoonish bravado). Making matters more complicated is that Buddy once employed Kevin and understands exactly how he operates, turning what initially appears to be a ridiculous lawsuit into something much more personal.
What starts as a simple and ingenious courtroom premise gradually opens into something much bigger as Kevin and Coyote begin pulling at the threads of Acme’s operation, uncovering cartoon-sized conspiracies and increasingly ridiculous schemes that allow the movie to expand its world without abandoning what made the initial idea so much fun. Green and the screenwriters have a good handle on how far they can stretch Looney Tunes logic, and the movie gets increasingly playful as the case takes Kevin deeper into a world where sinister corporate dealings, malfunctioning contraptions and characters being pulverized by heavy objects can comfortably coexist.
That expanding scope also gives Green plenty of room to incorporate familiar characters from across the Looney Tunes universe, and one of the movie’s greatest pleasures is seeing how naturally they fit into the story. Rather than stopping everything whenever someone recognizable appears, Green lets these characters waltz in and out of the action while keeping Coyote firmly at the center. There are plenty of faces fans will recognize, including an especially fun appearance from Bugs Bunny, but the movie never feels like it’s simply emptying the Warner Bros. toy chest for applause. The cameos serve the world and the comedy rather than becoming the reason for either to exist.
That restraint is particularly important because Coyote remains such an unusual protagonist to build a feature around. He communicates almost entirely through signs, facial expressions and body language, yet Green never feels the need to fundamentally reinvent him to make the story work. The same obsessive determination that has kept him chasing the Road Runner for decades becomes the foundation of an actual emotional arc, finding something strangely endearing beneath a character whose entire existence has traditionally been one prolonged setup for physical punishment. “Coyote vs. Acme” understands that the joke has always been his refusal to quit, but it also recognizes that there’s something admirable about that persistence when pointed toward something other than catching a bird.
Forte complements him beautifully because Kevin is essentially dealing with his own version of the same problem. He has spent his career taking the easy settlement and avoiding any situation that might expose his shortcomings, only to find himself representing a client who refuses to back down regardless of how impossible the fight appears. Forte, in a rare leading role, brings just enough desperation and insecurity to Kevin without allowing the character to become exhausting, and his gradual investment in Coyote’s case gives the movie a surprisingly effective human center.
Cena is equally well suited to the material, playing Buddy with the exaggerated confidence of someone who might as well have wandered out of a cartoon himself, while Condor provides a nice counterbalance as Paige and gets more to do as the case grows increasingly strange. The three understand the heightened wavelength Green is operating on, which helps the live-action side of “Coyote vs. Acme” feel like it belongs in the same universe as its animated characters rather than merely existing around them.
There are moments when some of the corporate satire hits familiar targets and a few jokes inevitably land better than others, but those are minor quibbles in a movie that moves with enough confidence and invention that it rarely loses its footing. If anything, the escalating conspiracies and increasingly elaborate side plots give “Coyote vs. Acme” more room to indulge in the kind of controlled chaos that has always made the Looney Tunes so entertaining, while the courtroom framework keeps everything connected to Coyote’s original grievance. It’s an impressive balancing act because the movie can be gleefully ridiculous without becoming completely weightless.
That balance places “Coyote vs. Acme” comfortably among the better live-action/cartoon hybrids, with obvious shades of “Space Jam” and, of course, “Who Framed Roger Rabbit.” Those are lofty comparisons, particularly the latter, but Green understands the fundamental reason this kind of movie works: the animated characters can’t simply be pasted into a live-action world and expected to carry everything through familiarity alone. Their insanity has to infect the people, environments and storytelling around them, and “Coyote vs. Acme” commits to that idea while still finding enough sincerity underneath the chaos to make its characters worth rooting for.
It also makes the movie’s long road to theaters impossible to separate from the experience of finally watching it. “Coyote vs. Acme” is about a character who has spent decades being flattened, blown up, launched off cliffs and crushed beneath objects several times his size, yet keeps dusting himself off and trying again because giving up has never occurred to him. The movie bearing his name nearly met an equally unceremonious fate, which makes its eventual arrival on the big screen feel like an oddly perfect extension of the story Green and company were already telling.
To even think there was a world in which “Coyote vs. Acme” might never have seen the light of day feels appropriately Acme-coded, but thankfully everyone involved finally gets to see their hard work pay off and audiences get to discover just how special this gem really is. After years of corporate drama surrounding a movie about taking on a corporation, there’s something incredibly satisfying about watching “Coyote vs. Acme” emerge from the wreckage as one of the summer’s most delightful surprises and, for once, allowing Wile E. Coyote to be the one who gets the last laugh.
Grade: B+
COYOTE vs. ACME opens in theaters Friday, August 28.
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