Hollywood nearly killed its own underdog story with ‘Coyote vs. Acme’

You already know the basics. The subject of dozens of delightful shorts dating back to the 1940s, the ravenous Wile E. Coyote tries repeatedly to catch and devour the delicious Road Runner, who swiftly beep beeps his way out of the canine’s complicated traps. Usually, the humor stems from Wile E’s’s various Acme contraptions backfiring on him in hilariously violent ways. But the film—like the humorous 1990 New Yorker story of the same name, on which it’s based—transposes this routine onto a realistic legal setting. Given the sheer number of times Acme’s products have endangered Wile E., does he have a case against them?

Directed by Earth to Echo’s Dave Green, the film places the Looney Tunes back in live action and begins with intrigue, as an Acme scientist—a tiny, animated Peter Lorre, the classic horror actor who was once a mainstay of these ’toons—tries to blow the whistle on corporate malpractice in 1992, before being banished into a cartoon black hole. In the present day, Wile E’s umpteenth failure to satiate his hunger fails courtesy of some malfunctioning Acme rocket skates. This finally pushes him to retreat into his gadget-filled cave, plagued by flashbacks to past failures, which appear as footage from old cartoon shorts. Down and dejected, he catches a TV advertisement in which an ambulance-chasing New Mexico billboard attorney, Kevin Avery (Will Forte)—think Saul Goodman for cartoon reparations—provides a potential answer to his troubles.

What follows is a surprisingly cogent, character-centric courtroom comedy-drama spliced with a southwestern mystery. Avery’s law firm, Avery, Jones and Maltese—named, as an homage, for original Merrie Melodies creators Tex Avery, Chuck Jones and Michael Maltese—deals in tiny settlements of a few hundred dollars when the occasional anvil or grand piano falls on a cartoon character’s head. The world around these humans is similar to our own, but for the many animated, anthropomorphized people doing odd jobs and being struck by objects along the way, a premise visually blended (often verging on three dimensional) through seamless attention to lighting design. So, it feels entirely congruous when Wile E. strolls into Avery’s office with a sky-high pile of evidence demanding his piece of the pie.

Foghorn Leghorn walks alongside actor John Cena in a scene from "Coyote vs. Acme."

Ketchup Entertainment

Avery, however, is not unlike Wile E. in one key way: he’s a perennial loser, willing to settle for the occasional pittance as long as it keeps him in business (but even that is a shaky prospect). He is, however, motivated by his Oxford-graduate niece Paige (Lana Condor), a fresh-faced attorney who hasn’t yet had her optimism ground out of her by the corporate legal machine. Some conspiring and looking the other way from minor characters leads to Avery unknowingly suing the all-powerful Acme Corporation—an in-world analogue for Apple, Microsoft and Amazon all at once—for everything they’re worth. This brings him face to face with the company’s counsel and his former law school rival, the cutthroat Buddy Crane (John Cena), who reports to Acme's head honcho, the ruthless southern rooster Foghorn Leghorn.

Familiar ’toons show up in surprising places—many of them voiced by Eric Bauza—but the story rests on the unspoken (though heavily referenced) assumption that these animated folk are seen as a disposable underclass. Wile E., who doesn’t speak except through hand-held signs, is a prime example of this, given the negligence with which he’s treated, making his fight for justice in corporate America a sudden flashpoint for both the media, and for shadowy forces who’ve spent decades keeping a lid on certain corporate developments. However, the one-tracked Wile E., with his penchant for Rube Goldberg machines, still has a one-track mind, and knows the Road Runner might be called to testify in court, complicating not only the reasons he continues fighting the case, but his burgeoning relationship with Avery, who begins to take a sincere interest for once. 

Although it meanders a little at first, Coyote vs. Acme coheres and evolves in surprising ways, until it eventually becomes a worthy successor to Who Framed Roger Rabbit, as a Chinatown-esque conspiracy movie in a “real” world filled with animated characters. The genre has had far more misses than hits (see also: the various Spaces Jam), so this ought to be good news for longtime fans. Unlike most modern incarnations, which lean heavily on contemporary references and oral punchlines, much of the humor aligns with the original conception of these characters, thanks to wacky visual gags that become even funnier when blended with real-world physics.

However, what makes the story work—especially as the movie enters its final act—is the sincerity with which it approaches a fundamentally absurd premise. Like comic writer Grant Morrison adapting Batman’s long, paradoxical history, Coyote Vs. Acme treats decades of isolated, formulaic shorts as a single continuity, and observes what this Sisyphean repetition does to a man (or rather, to a coyote), and how his fixations with the Road Runner eventually close him off from real relationships. It’s one of those galaxy-brained dramatic ideas that ought not to work, but somehow does, in part because Green and his cast are utterly committed to the bit, and never wink at the screen.

The result is a saccharine, David-and-Goliath story that, despite having fictitious parameters, feels more dramatically true to the broad concerns of modern America than most socially tinged studio features in recent memory. It sounds unhinged to even say it, but Coyote Vs. Acme really does feel like a strange miracle of an all-ages movie, the kind that Hollywood rarely releases anymore, and in this case, almost didn’t.