COYOTE VS ACME
THREE AND A HALF STARS Wile E. Coyote has had enough of ACME products exploding in his face. He gets lawyered up and takes on the corporation.
COMEDY ANIMATION US English #COYOTEVSACME Starring Wile E. Coyote (Genius), Will Forte
Anyone who grew up believing that Wile E. Coyote was a victim of poor product testing rather than his own questionable engineering was on to something.
Frustrated by the failure of his latest rocket boots, Wile hires a lawyer in that weird nexus where cartoons and humans co-exist and turns the tables on a company whose products have been responsible for so many of his spectacular failures. Seeking legal redress he enlists the ambulance chasing Kevin Avery (Will Forte) to take on the ACME corporation represented by Buddy Crane (John Cena). What begins as a cartoon character’s personal vendetta gradually becomes something considerably larger, involving planned malfeasance, sisyphus, skulduggery and enough exploding detonators to fill a court-room.
COYOTE VS ACME brings all the Looney Toons into the same gloriously elastic universe where Daffy Duck is in an asylum, Tweety has gone missing, Elmer Fudd heads a hearing and the Tasmanian Devil proves to be an unreliable witness. To what? To say would be to say too much. But off the record, ACME has a lot to answer for and Wile, in his winningly voiceless way, has all the questions.
The result is courtroom comedy par excellence, filled to groaning point with old jokes, new jokes, out jokes, in jokes and in-in-jokes that will separate the casual Toon watcher from those who know their Chuck Jones from their Tex Avery. Some gags are broad and hit you over the head like a cast-iron fry pan. Others fly past at, well, Road Runner speed. Fats. Really fast. Blink and you risk missing everything.
The Toon cast are, unsurprisingly, bonkers with the evil, scheming, perpetually hungry and effortlessly charming Wile leading the pack. His increasingly desperate signs and increasingly desperate physicality speak volumes. Forte and Cena are splendidly matched in the human roles, providing the straight-ish men required to let the cartoons run riot. And there is a plot twist concerning Wile E.’s motives that is best left unmolested. Brilliant!
What adds sauce to this cartoon salad is a generous side serve of satire. The filmmakers' willingness to bite corporate hand that feeds the Toons created a backstory in which the project languished on the shelf for years. A few deals later and, front story, the film finally limps to a cinema near you. Perhaps that’s why Warners is now a wholly owned subsidiary of ACME Corporation. It would explain a few things.
But that's not all folks. Was it worth the wait? Absolutely. COYOTE VS ACME is the most fun you'll have before an anvil drops on your head. It’s certainly the most fun you’ll have had since WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT. Litigation has never been this loony.
Comments