Watch for Falling Anvils

I think if you’re of a certain age then you probably have a certain amount of love for the classic Looney Tunes. The cast of characters, from Bugs Bunny to Porky Pig, Daffy Dug to Sylvester the Cat, and , of course, Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner, were icons for many kids growing up. The toons, which were made by Warners from the 1930s through the 1960s, were then rerun on television for decades. If you watched afternoon cartoons, Saturday morning cartoons, or just any block of toons on Nickelodeon or Cartoon Network, you knew this entire cast. They were formative members of many kids’ childhoods.

And then, of course, there’s Space Jam, the 1990s live action / cartoon hybrid that put Michael Jordan, one of the biggest athletic stars in the world, into the land of the Looney Tunes. That film became a smash hit, and another formative brick in many a child’s youth, and it helped cement the Looney Tunes for another generation. People from across six decades have a lot of love for these characters. It’s just unfortunate that more recent generations haven’t had these characters in their lives. More recent films with the cartoon starts, like Looney Tunes: Back in Action and Space Jam: A New Legacy, landed poorly at the Box Office, while the original cartoons that started it all are barely run on television anymore.

A movie like Coyote vs. Acme should be the kind of film that grants these characters new life. A loving homage to the cartoons of old, starring a couple of the most iconic characters of the bunch (everyone of a certain age knows the Coyote and Road Runner), should be the kind of film that gets butts in seats, one would think. And yet, after the film was made, the completed project was shoved in a can and scrapped, used by WB (under David Zazlav) to get a tax credit. Thankfully it was purchased by Ketchup Entertainment so that the film could, three years after its initial completion, finally see the light of day.

But was all the drama worth it. Is this actually the film that will bring the Looney Tunes back to prominence. Sadly, not really. While the film is amusing in places, and has some good material that can elicit more than a few chuckles, the overall production is more in love with the toons themselves than it is with actually making a good movie. It’s shaggy and sloppy, spending a lot of time needlessly spinning its gears when the actual story it’s trying to tell – a David v. Goliath story of a little guy getting crushed under the boot of a giant corporation – feels like an afterthought. There’s good ideas, and a lot of love, put into Coyote vs. Acme, but the resulting production doesn’t live up to all the drama surrounding its development and eventual release.

Wile E. Coyote has been chasing the Road Runner for decades. He’s a very hungry coyote and all he wants is to catch this bird so that he can get one good meal. Time and time again Wile E. sets up an elaborate plan, gets a piece of tech from Acme products to use in his scheme, and then, inevitably, just as he’s on the cusp of catching the Road Runner, the tech somehow fails, or backfires, or does something it wasn’t meant to do, and the whole plan blows up (quite literally) in the Coyote’s face. It’s a tale as old as time.

But when Wile E., back in his cave after another spectacular failed plan involving rocket skates, spies a television ad from Kevin Avery (Will Forte) saying, “if you’ve been injured in a cartoon product issue, let’s sue,” the Coyote decides to do just that. He packs up his stuff, including all the failed Acme products he’s bought over the years, and takes them into the city to Avery’s law office. Avery just wants to settle for a couple of hundred bucks, but the Coyote is persistent and manages to get a lawsuit brought against Acme for all his failed schemes. So now Avery has to take on the biggest company in the world while their top lawyer, Buddy Crane (John Cena), does everything he can to crush Avery and the Coyote like bugs.

As someone that watched a lot of Coyote and Road Runner cartoons back in the day, I appreciate the setup for this film. As Wile E. has seen scheme after scheme blow up in his face, all while the Road Runner sticks out his tongue, goes “beep beep” with a smile, and then runs off, you begin to feel bad for the guy. He just wants to eat the bird, and while that simple premise will obviously never reach the natural conclusion (of predator catching and eating prey), the amount of suffering and punishment the Coyote goes through over the decades takes him from villain to sad protagonist, and it eventually becomes hard to watch.

Seeing the Coyote get fed up and try to sue the company that makes all his failed gadgets does feel cathartic. The Coyote needs a win at this point, and while we all know he’ll never catch the bird, giving him someone else to take on so that he can get some kind of victory feels right. The film posits this as the little guy taking on a big, corrupt corporation, which also feels right in this current political climate, and put together the film has a winning idea that could easily carry its own story. If only the film could keep focused long enough to pull that off.

A big problem with Coyote vs. Acme is that the film doesn’t actually know how to tell a good lawyer yarn. Avery is set up as a failed lawyer, one who is afraid of losing so he always settles his cases before they ever get far enough to accomplish anything. Taking on Acme is a fool’s errand, in his mind, and there’s no chance of winning. In a different film, this would be the point where Avery buckles down, finds it within himself to be a real lawyer, and then goes on to make a solid case that tears Acme apart… except that doesn’t really happen. Time and again the case twists out of his hands and somehow Acme comes out on top. The film doesn’t actually care about building its lawyer story, it just wants to look like it does.

Repeatedly it squanders perfectly solid plot ideas so that it can do a silly twist (which is rarely actually funny), and then move the story to a different courtroom, for a different version of the case, for Avery to have to try and step up once again. Nothing ever feels like it’s getting accomplished, and even near the end of the film (mild spoilers) the duo of Avery and Coyote still fail to make their case in proper fashion. Thus, when (further spoilers) Acme is eventually brought down later, it’s by sheer happenstance and not in a way that the film actually earns. It’s pretty aggravating.

At the same time, the film also squanders many moments of humor that could have otherwise worked. The pacing for the comedy in this film is pretty bad. There’s maybe a good joke every couple of minutes, whereas in the original Looney Tunes the jokes were packed in tight. Those old cartoons were just a few minutes long and they had to tell a whole story, and shove in a bunch of laughs, so it created a frenetic pace. While it’s understandable that the film can’t quite keep up that same pace, being a live-action-hybrid film and also needing to tell a bigger story (supposedly, anyway), the pace is so slow that you start to wonder where the jokes are.

Frankly the film could use a lot of tightening up. It needs better focus, not just on the main characters but also on the story. It lets itself get narratively pulled away regularly, wandering down side paths and missed plotlines, all while searching for the funny. If it could just be a more focused tale of Avery and Coyote taking on Acme in some version of a John Grisham courtroom yarn, just with cartoons, I think it would be much stronger for it. There’s a narrative hook to this film I like, we just need more focus on it.

Well, that and, if I’m being honest, the art style for the film doesn’t work for me. The movie uses 3D-rendered, cell shaded versions of the Looney Tunes characters, and they just don’t look right. They’re cheap and poorly made, lacking the personality of the original toons. Which is made worse, notably, any time the film shows off the original, hand drawn toons, which it does more than a few times. Those cartoons have more life and personality in them than the 3D versions the film mostly uses, and the comparison is bad. Very, very bad.

Coyote vs. Acme feels like a massive misfire. I like the idea of it, and I won’t deny I chuckled a few times during its runtime. I wasn’t bored, per se, but I certainly didn’t enjoy the film as much as I wanted to. It’s a film just on a cusp of being good, with no clue how to quite get over that hump. A solid courtroom yarn this is not. Coyote vs. Acme spends a lot of time failing to do the one thing it desperately needed to do: make itself interesting for every generation watching the film. If you liked the old Looney Tunes cartoons then you’ll probably feel a little something for the characters on screen. But if this is all new to you this film isn’t going to sell you on it. Just like the little kids in the screening I went to, you’ll probably wonder what all the hype was about.