The first five minutes of Coyote vs. Acme had me howling. The shelved, nearly-lost comedy begins with my favorite Looney Tunes character, Wile E. Coyote (Super Genius!!!) and his endless failed attempts to capture his forever nemesis, Road Runner, and presumably eat him. Of course, these failed ventures are fueled by loads of malfunctioning ACME gadgets like the infamous rocket-powered skates and the magnet gloves. It ends as they always do, Wile E. plummeting to his death, the magnet attracting all sorts of metal objects he hadn’t planned on, and crushed by boulders to boot. Yes, this is the Looney Tunes that I love so much.
Coyote vs. Acme has been a cinematic obsession ever since Warner Bros. tried to drop the film to get a tax write-off, making the opening crawl about WB being a corporate subsidiary of ACME Corporation a bit ironic. Ketchup Entertainment, which had released WB Animation’s The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie just last year, saw the clamor and swooped in. Whether the film is a box office hit or not (likely not), they did the right thing. While Who Framed Roger Rabbit is the standard-bearer for the collision of animation and live-action, Coyote vs. Acme follows closely in its footsteps. In the same way that 1989 classic beautifully mixed cartoonish antics with a compelling mystery, so too does this film capture the Looney Tunes spirit while presenting an engrossing legal thriller and a true underdog story of one Coyote vs. Big Business.
Credit goes to screenwriter Samy Burch, who somehow envisioned Wile E. Coyote as a representation of the “little guy”, the everyman fighting against evil, corrupt corporations. Sick and tired of his gadgets failing, Wile E. sees a televsion ad for the law firm of Avery, Jones & Maltese (three of the best Looney Tunes directors), and hires attorney Kevin Avery (Will Forte), who specializes in cartoon lawsuits. Kevin might be a specialist, but what he’s really good at is settling, hardly ever taking his cases to court. He manages to secure a sizable payout for a minor offense ACME is willing to concede to, but when his intern and niece Paige (Lana Condor) files a much larger suit, and Wile E. refuses to accept the settlement, the corporation unleashes its heavy hitter, top attorney Buddy Crane, a douchebag played by John Cena. The more of an a-hole that Buddy becomes, the bigger his bolo ties seem to get.
It turns out that the ACME Corporation has tons of corrupt secrets its trying to keep under wraps, but they aren’t the only ones with devious motives. Wile E. Coyote is who he is for a reason, and he has an agenda for going through all of this, too. While we’re drawn to these mysteries, Kevin has his own evolution from disaffected paper pusher to a courageous legal eagle willing to fight the good fight and not get a piano dropped on his head, or fall into a portable hole. ACME has a lot of tricks up its sleeve.
I’m not going to sit here and pretend that Coyote vs. Acme keeps up the machine gun rate of jokes as in the first few minutes. Some jumbled plot mechanics and a lot of courtroom drama get in the way of that. At the same time, this movie picks and chooses its spots, utilizing many of Looney Tunes’ wackiest characters to the fullest.
Directed by Dave Green, the film is shot like an episode of Ally McBeal, only with animated players in the courtroom proceedings. While it would’ve been more dazzling on the eyes to have live-action characters in a fully-animated world like Toon Town, it’s equally fun to have it set in Albuquerque, a place Bugs Bunny devotees will appreciate. That’s the feeling you get while watching Coyote vs. Acme; it’s a movie made for the people who appreciate the long Looney Tunes lineage, and understand its characters and sense of humor. It’s a movie made by people who clearly love these cartoon icons, and if that means Wile E. Coyote will get into legal trouble once again, we’ll all be better off for it.
Coyote vs. Acme hits theaters on August 28th.
