Coyote crack-up

It’s almost always a bad sign when a movie’s release is put off for months or years.

Not so with this long-delayed flick, an anarchistic delight that follows Looney Tunes character Wile E. Coyote as he heads to the big city of Albuquerque, N.M., to find Kevin Avery (Will Forte), a washed-up human lawyer who specializes in “cartoon accident law.”

Wile E. wants Kevin to sue the Acme Corporation, whose products — magnetic gloves, catapults, parachutes, TNT detonators — have been malfunctioning for decades, sabotaging the coyote’s perpetual pursuit of his archnemesis, the Road Runner.

With direction by David Green (who has worked on the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles franchise) and a scripting team that includes Superman helmer James Gunn, Coyote vs. Acme is not quite as revolutionary as Who Framed Roger Rabbit, the 1988 classic that kicked off animation/live-action mashups.

But it’s packed with silly sight gags, clever callbacks and (literally) explosive slapstick comedy.

The story is also unexpectedly sweet, rather tenderly repositioning Wile E. Coyote as an existential hero for our time.

Finally, on a meta level, the movie’s own history is an underdog — under-coyote? — saga of the scrappy little guy going up against a faceless corporate Goliath. Coyote vs. Acme was wrapped way back in 2022 and then shelved by Warner Bros., the studio deciding they liked it better as a tax writeoff. Fortunately, a grassroots campaign and a buyout by Ketchup Entertainment (which recently acquired the rights to November 1963, the Winnipeg-shot JFK Mob drama) ensured its eventual release.

This backstory means that whenever the movie is pointing to the bean-counting perfidiousness of Acme, you can write in the real-life Warner Bros. company instead. And it feels swell to beat a massive monopolistic corporation, not just on screen but off.

Kevin initially wants to settle Wile E.’s suit for small change, seeing it as just another “$300 rocket-skates case.” He’s afraid of failure, and he’s hesitant to take on the monolithic might of Acme.

He’s also reluctant to face his old law-school frenemy Buddy Crane, played by John Cena, the actor and WWE wrestler, who makes a pretty good heel as Acme’s in-house legal counsel.

Kevin’s initial courtroom performance is so tentative he makes an objection to his own argument. He’s boosted, though, by the starry-eyed idealism of his niece Paige (To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before’s Lana Condor) and by the insane tenacity of that coyote.

Wile E.’s communication methods involve stick drawings, occasional handheld signs, and a melancholy face and posture, but he gets his message across — to Kevin and to the audience. In fact, he’s more three-dimensional than several of the film’s human characters, who need a bit more fleshing out.

Green does a nice job of building a universe where the regular world rubs up against the stretch-and-squash possibilities of cartoons. The animation, which includes a blend of hand-drawn and computer-generated processes, retains some of the tactile, old-school feel of the original Looney Tunes.

There are small speaking roles for Porky Pig, Daffy Duck and, of course, Bugs Bunny, as well as brief drop-ins by such obscure Looney Tuners as Witch Hazel, Gossamer, Hippity Hopper and Pete Puma. (Pepe Le Pew is onscreen for a millisecond before being denounced as a sex predator and removed.)

Beyond the cartoon cameos, the Albuquerque setting makes for some clear Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul riffs, and the courtroom drama even seems to reference such super-serious films as The Verdict and Michael Clayton. There are also connections to Greek myth, with Wile E. Coyote being explicitly compared to Sisyphus, doomed to roll a boulder up a hill every day only to see it roll back down again.

As you can see from this grab-bag of influences, this is the sort of family film that’s rare these days, the kind that just wants to do its own weird thing rather than engineer everything to guarantee broad appeal. The results are generally kid-friendly (at least for school-age children), while working for adults, too — especially those of us who remember watching The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Hour on CBC on Saturday evenings, right before Hockey Night in Canada.

There is clear nostalgia appeal here, but the film is also pressingly — and depressingly — current, taking as a central theme the increasing enshittification of everyday consumer products, with their poor quality and planned obsolescence and lousy customer service.

Even more than that, Coyote vs. Acme is about the concentration of power into massive, multi-level corporations that threaten to override our civic institutions, our governments and our media.

Maybe the delay of the film’s release to 2026 will actually help it. For a lot of people, that feeling that anvils are repeatedly falling on our heads has intensified, and that hapless coyote seems like someone with whom we can identify.

“No matter what happens, he picks himself up and tries again and again and again and again,” says Kevin in his summing up. “He wakes up every morning with purpose and with hope, and I think everyone should be inspired by that.”

Amen to that. As Camus — and Bugs Bunny — would say, one must imagine Sisyphus happy.

arts@winnipegfreepress.com