Beep beep! Coyote Vs. Acme has dashed into cinemas this weekend after its eleventh hour rescue from the cutting room floor.
This new Looney Tunes/live-action hybrid in the style of Who Framed Roger Rabbit? very nearly suffered the same fate as Warner Bros’ Batgirl movie, with the company set to lock it in the vault forever in the name of a thirty-million dollar tax write-off rather than risk a box office bomb. This caused a stir among distributors and impassioned creatives who saw real value getting the film to cinema audiences, and three years on from that initial howl, we finally have the chance to make our minds up for ourselves.
‘If you’ve been hit by an anvil, press 1. If you’ve been electrocuted, press 2. If you’ve been crushed by a falling piano, press 3.’
Ironically, this film that very nearly never saw the light of day at the hands of a big, all-powerful corporation is, from start to finish, a heartfelt takedown of an eerily similar, cold-hearted and sprawling empire. Coyote Vs. Acme adapts Ian Frazier’s 1990 New Yorker article of the same name, with Wile E. Coyote, scourge of the American desert and long-time pursuer of the agile Road Runner, suing the Acme Corporation for seventy-five years’ worth of damages from their faulty, cartoon products. Their only reliable quality is their ability to cause him severe bodily harm.
With Elle Woods fully-booked and Matt Murdoch seeing to business elsewhere, Mr. Coyote’s best hope for an attorney is Kevin Avery, played by Will Forte. Soured by a few decades in the business, Kevin is content to lie low, settling claims against Acme for chump change payouts with little hope of ever turning things around for the better. With the help of his fresh out of law school niece and Wile E’s literal mountain of malfunctioning evidence, though, this new case may well be the one to put the firm on the map and settle the score with his old Harvard rival Buddy Crane (John Cena), head of Acme’s own legal team.
The idea of a famous cartoon villain taking an animated conglomerate to court over a pair of temperamental rocket skates is innately silly, but writer Samy Burch finds a lot of time to pack plenty more jokes in all the same. I’m not fully keyed into the Looney Tunes mythos in the same way that a lot of people are – I grew up on the Scooby-Doo and Tom and Jerry side of the Toontown tracks – but their sense of humour is clearly on full display here, even if it didn’t necessarily land with me every time.
Wile E, for example, can only ‘talk’ through a limited number of cartoon signs, which creates a fun disconnect between him and his very human representatives. The environments, too, are often played around with in charming little ways, like painting an exit route into a wall in the midst of a chase or tilting a real road to the side as you flit at top speed. There’s a concerted effort to make you laugh here, and while you probably won’t be guffawing at every single gag, they come thick and fast enough to put you in a good mood, even if that’s just a little chuckle.
The villains are characterised by a firm sense of style over substance, pleasing judges and juries alike with charismatic performances that pander to American ideals rather than focusing on the facts.
If anyone at the back is still unsure as to what the film’s trying to say there, then the Acme head, the giant rooster Foghorn Leghorn, is here characterised as a sly-talking, money-loving golf enthusiast with a fondness for talking down to (and stepping on) the little guy.
That bold depiction is a bug; not a feature and as such I think there’s something very funny about Cena’s character, a proud and besuited blowhard, being as cartoonish and brash a character as his boss, who’s well and truly chicken in every sense of the word.
While Kevin’s turn from a chewed-up, burnt out non-believer to an ardent defender of justice against Acme’s negligence has a clunky feel, Coyote Vs. Acme as a whole manages to find something interesting underneath the legal red tape. You wouldn’t believe it as you walk into the cinema, but the film does touch on the genuine injuries that these faulty products cause the Toons, especially Wile E, and I couldn’t help but feel glum seeing the vast majority get so little kickback from their claims. Make no mistake, this isn’t doing The Day the Violence Died – leave that to The Simpsons – but the narrative is certainly helped along by this added layer of depth and some third-act interactions between longstanding characters do their best to tug at our heart strings, too.
BBFC: Rated PG for mild bad language, threat, injury detail.
Coyote Vs. Acme is in cinemas now.
