Coyote vs. Acme was never supposed to be seen. It had been condemned by then-CEO of Warner Bros.-Discovery, David Zaslav, to be shelved for a $30 million tax write-off along with Batgirl, which was also nearly completed, but rumored to be of poor quality. Warners tried to sell the movie to other distributors, but they all passed and it looked like the intriguingly-premised movie - Wile E. Coyote sues the Acme Corporation for their defective products preventing him from catching the Road Runner - was going to be lost forever until Ketchup Entertainment bought it for $50M and released it, grossing a respectable $126M. While not a blockbuster, it was a respectable result. Some online reviewers went overboard in praising it, but while it's not that great, it's definitely better than many movies not buried as write-offs that perhaps should have.
Opening in 1992 in a world where cartoon characters coexist with humans (a la Who Framed Roger Rabbit?), we see the cartoon Dr. Lorre (modeled after Peter Lorre) leaking Acme Corp secrets to an unknown contact before being captured and forced to leap into an Acme Portable Hole. We then jump ahead 30 years to witness the hapless Coyote thwarted in his attempts to bag the Road Runner by defective Acme Magnet Gloves and Rocket Skates.
While back in his desert cave, piled high with failed Acme products, he sees a TV commercial for the law firm of Avery, Jones & Maltese (meta-named after legendary Looney Tunes directors & writers Tex Avery, Chuck Jones, and Michael Maltese) with lead partner Kevin Avery (Will Forte, Saturday Night Live) soliciting business from cartoons harmed by Acme products. Thus a plan is hatched in Coyote's mind and he heads to Albuquerque.
When he arrives, he discovers Kevin is a broken-down, weak man who only wants to settle the case for a few hundred dollars. Thanks to cartoon technology, Coyote crams a small mountain of failed Acme products into the standard banker box for evidence and the cartoon employees of the firm itemize them all and present a thick book of a legal filing to Acme's legal department and head attorney Buddy Crane (Jon Cena, Trainwreck), a former Harvard Law classmate of Kevin's. He offers Avery $50,000 to settle, but the Coyote tears up the offer and the case goes to trial.
While Kevin just wants to get the case over with, his niece, Paige (Lana Condor, To All The Boys I've Loved Before), an intern at the firm, wants to dig into the case and is getting calls from a mysterious tipster who calls everyone "Doc" (who could that be?) leading them to discover a corporate plot where cartoons are sold deliberately defective products to improve Acme's human offerings. Pressuring Buddy from the Acme side is the firm's CEO, Foghorn Leghorn, and the Road Runner becomes an important witness on both sides.
Most people fall into one of two camps - you're either a Mickey Mouse/Disney kid or a Bugs Bunny/Looney Tunes king - and I am definitely the latter and the best parts of Coyote vs. Acme are the blink and miss it throwaway sight gags that pepper the proceedings like how the Coyote is reading a huge book entitled How To Wait Around Dramatically, a spider mugging another one, or Porky Pig showing up for "the pantsless modeling gig" along with numerous callbacks to classic Road Runner cartoon gags.
However, the overall script by Samy Burch (Oscar nominated for May December) with story assist from James Gunn (recently sacked as co-CEO of DC Studios) and Jeremey Slater (Pet and co-writer of the catastrophic Fant4stic) is flat and slack as it never really makes the human characters more than, forgive me, cartoons. The explanation for Kevin's sad sack demeanor is weak and no evidence of why he would've been in Harvard Law with Buddy is implied. If they were trying to make a racial allegory about cartoons being second-class citizens preyed upon by Evil Capitalism to enrich humans that doesn't add up as Acme's CEO is a cartoon and Elmer Fudd shows up as a Senator.
Perhaps the best performance is Wile E. Coyote himself as he doesn't speak, communicating thru "limited signs" (another good gag), but via body language makes him the sympathetic center of the story. Yes, you will feel sorry for the Coyote.
If it had been more fleshed-out and trimmed down perhaps 10 minutes, Coyote vs. Acme would've been more nimble and engaging, but it's still a good watch for fans of the tunes which are looney.
Score: 6/10. Catch it on cable/streaming.
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