Directed by Dave Green | Written by Samy Burch, James Gunn, and Jeremy Slater, based on a New Yorker article by Ian Frazier | 101 min | ▲1/2 | In Cinemas
Studio heads like Warner Bros’ David Zaslav choosing to shelve completed feature films like Coyote vs. ACME for tax reasons, there’s no excuse for that no matter how bad the movie is.
That said, I can almost see his reasoning for this one. The positive buzz this, at best, mediocre product is getting must be the result of it somehow managing to get a release with another studio, and it’s objectively not a total disaster. But that’s no endorsement.
This movie is what it appears, a very late arriving attempted revitalization of classic Looney Tunes, which as everyone knows is one of the pillars that built Warner Bros. I grew up with those cartoons — the Roadrunner and the Coyote being the most simple and endlessly entertaining. Wile E. Coyote is obsessed by this flightless, speedy fowl, and will use any method imaginable to catch and kill the beeping little fucker. But no matter how many lethal devices he utilizes, no matter how many Rube Goldberg-esque traps he concocts, he will always end up burnt to a crisp or flattened at the bottom of a New Mexico canyon with the bird speeding away. And the coyote, no matter the injury, always manages to come back.
Sure, the cartoons raised certain questions, but they were easily ignored given they were gloriously silly five minute comedy thrillers. But here we are in a movie, so let’s go: Where did the Coyote get the funds to purchase all those missiles and machines (always from the ACME company, natch’)? Couldn’t he have used those same funds at the grocery store to a buy a less speedy, less beepy, pre-cooked bird with more tasty flesh? Given the capitalist reality this movie is set in, those questions seem a lot more relevant, even one where, like Who Framed Roger Rabbit, live action real people cohabitate with animated characters. The internal logic is off. Worse, they try and make this a legal thriller, like Erin Brockovich, except inane and unfunny.
(It’s hard to know what someone would make of this film if they had no knowledge of the original cartoon characters. Not much, I suspect.)
Wile E Coyote, who’s entirely silent, goes to attorney Kevin Avery (Will Forte) to plead his case: He claims this ubiquitous company ACME has sold him defective, dangerous machinery for years. The problem is Mr Coyote is a wildly unreasonable and untrustworthy client who can’t even read the safety labels on the products he purchases.
Avery is entirely uninterested in taking the case — he’s cynical, tired, and comfortable with securing endless settlements for his clients — but accidentally a box full of evidence gets catalogued and the case is on, partly thanks to Paige Avery (Lana Condor), Kevin Avery’s keen Harvard-trained intern and niece. They face ACME head litigator Buddy Crane (John Cena, having a good time), and the power and wealth of the largest, and most evil corporations in the world looking to cover up its malfeasance. Turns out there’s a conspiracy hidden under here, of course.
Then we’ve got the inevitable cameos from the Looney Tunes character staples, and the problem here is that since the era of Mel Blanc and Chuck Jones, most of them just don’t sound like they used to, or they don’t move like they used to in those magnificent hand-drawn animations. Bugs Bunny is especially ersatz here, playing a Deep Throat figure with secrets to share, his movements are weirdly frenetic and his voice and intonation is just wrong.
Tweety Bird and Cena have a chucklesome scene together, one of the few moments that stir a genuine laugh, but Duffy Duck, Elmer Fudd, and Porky Pig, they come and go without making much impact, while Yosemite Sam is missing in action and an animated Peter Lorre shows up but never speaks. Foghorn Leghorn sounds closest to the original, but he’s been turned from a charming, blustery southern rooster into a sinister corporate attorney.
The part of this movie that’s an anti-corporate screed like The Insider does have some teeth, and the delicious irony that a massive entertainment corporation almost killed this movie and now we’re getting to see it anyway gives the whole thing a special frisson, but it never escapes the feeling it’s a mechanical extension of intellectual property. The film’s effort to explore litigious plot points rarely achieves anything close to the minimum you’d think a movie full of beloved animated characters should be — fun.
We get a couple final nails in this cartoon coffin: The suggestion of some kind of symbiotic connection, or perhaps even something akin to a friendship, between the Coyote and Roadrunner — this isn’t Batman and Joker, folks — and when the film tries to convince us that what’s truly admirable in the psychopathic Wile E. Coyote is his Great American Work Ethic. That’s when I wanted to throw myself off a New Mexico cliff, to disappear at the bottom in an impact crater beneath a cloud of dust.
