REVIEW: ‘Coyote vs. Acme’

The new screwball comedy Coyote vs. Acme isn't actually new. It was finished three years ago. And the fact that you can now go see it this weekend at your local movie theater is pretty close to a miracle. I'll get to that in a minute, but first, let me just say that Coyote vs. Acme is pretty close to a miracle in its own right.

Based on a one-joke New Yorker humor piece by Ian Frazier published 36 years ago, Coyote vs. Acme tosses Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, Erin Brockovich, The Verdict, A Few Good Men, and All the President's Men in a blender and transforms the mélange into a fabulous confection—one of the very few genuinely memorable American comedies of the decade.

You know you're in good hands with director Dave Green and screenwriter Samy Burch (working from a James Gunn storyline) when you are informed within the first minute that the movie "is based on a true story."

Coyote vs. Acme concerns a misbegotten shlep of an Albuquerque lawyer who finds himself conducting a major tort action on behalf of the Looney Tunes character Wile E. Coyote. They are seeking compensation for the injuries the coyote keeps sustaining while using products made by the Acme Corporation as part of his daily schemes to trap and eat the Road Runner in the canyons of New Mexico.

I’m a huge fan of Roger Rabbit, but that innovative blend of live action and animation has always had a slightly leaden quality to it, as if its director and writers thought they needed to drop anvils on our heads to make sure we got the point. Coyote vs. Acme is also set in a world in which toons and humans live together; Elmer Fudd is a senator, while Foghorn Leghorn is the CEO of Acme. But it has an offhand lightness to it that Roger Rabbit lacks. The creative team here has loaded the movie up with dozens of quick bits of animated comic slapstick, a lot of it in the background or off to the side in the midst of scenes featuring plot exposition or character development. Dave Green shows great pacing and comic-timing skill here by tossing these bits off; a less confident director would be shoving them right into our faces. This is a movie that will reward a second or third viewing.

Will Forte plays the shlep lawyer. Forte's specialty as a comic performer is his willingness to commit to roles in which he comes across as unattractive, weak, and foolish. And boy, is he ever that way here. A lazy Harvard Law grad entirely bereft of ambition, Kevin Avery files tiny lawsuits against Acme on behalf of cartoon characters and scores easy payoffs of a couple hundred bucks a shot (we get to see Porky Pig's file, with photographs showing the stuttering swine getting progressively more and more crippled and securing settlements of $211 here and $172 there).

Kevin wants to make a similar quick-and-dirty deal for the coyote, but Wile E. is absolutely determined to get into a courtroom for reasons that only become clear later in one of the movie's several clever plot twists. In that courtroom, the two of them will have to face down a delightful John Cena, playing the hotshot litigator atop Acme's legal department.

Neither Forte nor Cena is the star of this movie. The Oscar-worthy performance is given by none other than Wile E. Coyote, who is one of the more memorable characters in recent memory—sad, angry, exasperated, diabolical, Machiavellian, and pathetic all at once. As rendered here, Wile E. is so expressive that he somehow evokes all three Marx Brothers and the Grinch at the same time. There’s been talk since the box-office triumph of Project Hail Mary that James Ortiz, the puppeteer and voice actor who brings the alien Rocky to life in that terrific picture, deserves awards consideration. So what the hell, nominate a cartoon!

To top it off, he is mute, as he is in all the Road Runner cartoons, though Looney Tunes canon would have allowed Green and Burch to have him talk. In the cartoons in which he is Bugs Bunny's antagonist, the wild dog speaks with a plummy accent and refers to himself grandly as "Wile E. Coyote, Super Genius" even as Bugs outwits and outsmarts him every time. (Bugs shows up here too, as Deep Throat—providing Kevin with evidence of a conspiracy so vast that it even involves a turncoat Tweety Bird.)

Coyote vs. Acme was filmed in 2022 and the extensive animation was completed by mid-2023. At that point, Warner Discovery CEO David Zaslav decided not only to shelve Coyote vs. Acme and another midbudget WB film about Batgirl, but literally to erase them from existence to provide the company with valuable tax write-offs. This shocking move occasioned terror and outrage in Hollywood, but not enough to save the Batgirl picture from being permanently deleted. The few people who got a chance to see Coyote vs. Acme, however, were almost uniformly positive. That response stayed its execution at Zaslav's hands, but the movie still sat on the shelf for two years until WB finally sold it to a theatrical distributor of last resort called Ketchup for $50 million.

Ketchup releases movies that the major studios regret having made, like the Michael Mann biopic Ferrari with Adam Driver. That one was a dog, as was another Looney Tunes knockoff called The Day the Earth Blew Up. This time, they got a winner. Like ketchup itself, Coyote vs. Acme is delicious.

John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary and host of its daily podcast, is the Washington Free Beacon’s movie critic.

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