‘Coyote vs. Acme’ Review: A Cartoon Underdog That Beat Corporate America Twice, Once On Screen And Once Off It
There is a strange poetry in the fact that a movie about a hapless desert predator suing a company for selling him faulty rocket skates almost got wiped off the map by real corporate accounting before anyone ever saw it. ‘Coyote vs. Acme’ spent years in limbo after its original studio decided it made more financial sense as a tax write off than as a finished film, and it only reached theaters because a smaller distributor stepped in to rescue it. Walking into the film with that history in mind, I expected a scrappy passion project trying to justify its own existence.
What I got instead was something far more assured. Wile E. Coyote, after decades of being flattened, scorched, and launched off cliffs by shoddy Acme merchandise, finally decides to take the company to court, and he does it by hiring the cheapest, laziest lawyer in Albuquerque. Will Forte plays that lawyer, Kevin Avery, as a man who has built his entire career around settling for less, which makes him the worst possible match for a client who has never once given up on anything in his life. John Cena shows up as Acme’s slick opposing counsel, and Lana Condor rounds out the human cast with the kind of grounded energy this premise needs to stay believable.
Once the courtroom stuff kicks in, though, the film reveals its real hand, and that is where my actual opinion starts to take shape. This is a movie with genuine contempt for corporate impunity, and it uses the most disposable character in American animation to make that point stick. Wile E. never speaks a word of dialogue and somehow carries the emotional center of the entire story, communicating decades of stubborn heartbreak through nothing but posture and timing. That is a tightrope walk, and director Dave Green pulls it off with a level of craft that made me forget I was watching a cartoon coyote argue with a human jury.
The blending of animation and live action here belongs in the same conversation as the best hybrid films of the last forty years, not because it copies any one of them, but because it understands why that format works when it works. The cartoon logic never gets sanded down to make the humans comfortable, and the humans never feel like they wandered in from a different, blander movie. Foghorn Leghorn and a parade of other Looney Tunes regulars pop in in ways that reward longtime fans without turning the whole thing into a nostalgia checklist, and the courtroom setting gives the film a structure sturdy enough to hang all that anarchy on without it collapsing into noise.
Where it stumbles a little is in the back half, when the satire occasionally states its thesis more plainly than it needs to, spelling out the corporate greed angle in ways that slightly undercut how well the visuals were already doing that work. A few subplots involving the wider cast also feel thinner than the central lawsuit, present mostly to pad out the runtime rather than deepen the story. None of it derails the movie, but it kept this from being the kind of flawless comedy I was rooting for by the midpoint.
Taken as a whole, ‘Coyote vs. Acme’ is a rare studio comedy that treats a legacy character with real affection instead of just licensing his face, and it backs that affection up with actual jokes, actual stakes, and an ending that earns its sentiment rather than demanding it. I walked out more moved by a silent cartoon coyote than by most human leads I have seen on screen this year, and I mean that as the highest compliment I can give a film built around anvils and dynamite. This one deserves the second chance it fought so hard to get.
9 out of 10
Did Wile E. finally get the last laugh, or did the courtroom angle wear thin for you? Drop your verdict in the comments.
