Coyote vs. Acme
Coyote vs. Acme is a far better movie than it has any right to be, even if it’s not all that it could be. Occasionally character focused, a little angry and sharper focused than one might expect and most of all funny, it can’t quite live up to the Who Framed Roger Rabbit? standard, but maybe it doesn’t need to. Taken on its own merits there’s enough self-awareness to give it more heft than this kind of film often manages: a corporate oriented piece of IP-exploitation about the nihilism of IP-exploitation and the banal villainy behind it. Self-aware lampshade hanging doesn’t by itself induce quality – see the mixed success of Chip ‘n Dale’s Rescue Rangers for proof of that – but Coyote at least attempts to add something like real insight on top of the meta narrative.
But how meta it is. As we all know, for years Wile E. Coyote has been trying to capture and eat the speedy Road Runner. When genetic cunning and capability has failed him he has turned to the tools of the ACME corporation to help him – rocket boots and catapults and bombs and the like – but it never quite works out. Eventually fed up with the whole thing, Coyote enlists the aid of cartoon lawyer Kevin Avery (Forte) to sue the ACME corporation for all the pain and suffering they caused him through their defective gizmos. The more the underdog legal team digs into the case the more sinister ACME’s motives become, revealing an uncompromising sense of corporate greed willing to do whatever it wants to juice profits.
The villain of Coyote vs. Acme you see is capitalism itself. In the form of ACME we are given capitalism at its ugliest a system not simply lacking in heart but possessing a malicious belief that anything outside the corporation itself exists only to be monetized, consumed or discarded. As an idea it’s both more pointed and more cartoonish than most of the nostalgia it actively deals in, not least because it’s embodied by the films most cartoonish characters, both literal (Foghorn Leghorn) and figurative (John Cena). There’s little subtle about the exaggeration, nothing involving the Looney Tunes is given to subtlety but there is also some real missed opportunity to compare it to Kevin’s own predatory ways as he seeks out desperate clients and easy settlements over anything like justice. Not that a film called Coyote vs. Acme needs that sort of thing – it can and does subsist on a healthy diet of restaged cartoon sight gags and inside jokes – except in they way that it points at them. When the Road Runner makes his long delayed appearance to recontextualize the nature of his relationship with Coyote the film actually starts to realize some emotional depth it had avoided at all cost until that point. It says something about Coyote’s construction that despite giving him little inner life, it is easier to believe his frustration, humiliation and attachment to the Road Runner and their ritual than it is to the emotions of most of the human supporting characters.
It gets left to Forte to do most of the dramatic heavy lifting when he’s not acting as the butt of Coyote’s oddly timed traps and constructions. Forgetting why on earth many of these gags would exist at all (beyond the knowing requirement that the movie needs them) it doesn’t hide the strangeness of casting a performer famous for making buffoonish unreality sincere and forcing him into the role of straight man. Cena by comparison has a much easier time of it as he is allowed to become a live action cartoon, smiling malignancy in a suit, and it fits perfectly within the satire of the film. In some ways it would be curious to know how it would have played if Forte and Cena had swapped places, which may sound like a critique of the film Coyote is not rather than the one it is, except it only occurs because of the deviancy of the film itself.
Director Dave Green, working on a screenplay which seems to have gone through a dozen hands, is trying mightily, which results in a film that is more interesting than it is successful. It still must exist in a world where there are both wonderful examples of a film clearly explaining how cartoons can be true to themselves while still experiencing the human range of desire, resentment and hope, and examples of abject failure at the concept. Coyote vs. Acme careens between those poles, never quite going over the edge but not quite able to stay on the straight and narrow either. But it is funny and often unexpectedly sincere, if disjoined but maybe that’s the way it should be. A film about Wile E. Coyote repeadetly discovering the elaborate contraption he has built doesn’t work quite how he intended being itself a flawed device that frequently gets close but never quite lands may the only result that could have been possible.
6.5 out of 10
Starring Will Forte, John Cena, Lana Condor, Tone Bell, Christopher Mintz-Plasse and Luis Gutierrez. Directed by Dave Green.