There’s a version of Coyote vs. Acme that exists purely to milk one joke for ninety minutes: Wile E. Coyote finally takes Acme Corporation to court over seventy years of exploding anvils and mail-order catastrophes. Thankfully, that’s not the film Dave Green has made.
Some background is useful here to fully grasp the importance of this movie release. Warner Bros. completed the film back in 2023 and then shelved it rather than release it, a decision that left it in limbo for three years until Ketchup Entertainment picked it up and finally brought it to cinemas. Given that history, it would have been easy to write this off before the opening credits.
Directed by Green from a screenplay by Samy Burch, with a story credited to Burch, James Gunn and Jeremy Slater, the film draws loosely on Ian Frazier’s 1990 New Yorker piece imagining a lawsuit brought on the coyote’s behalf. Here, that lawyer is Kevin Avery (Will Forte, excellent), a washed-up ambulance chaser who advertises on highway billboards and mostly settles cases for cartoon characters with minor property damage. Opposing him is Buddy Crane (John Cena), a Harvard Law classmate turned Acme’s slickest counsel; a rivalry that tells us exactly where the courtroom scenes are headed, and is all the more enjoyable for it.
Forte is well cast, bringing a hangdog quality to Kevin that suggests a man bracing for bad news before it’s even arrived. Eric Bauza, meanwhile, voices Wile E. without a scrap of dialogue – he has hsndheld signs, but they are limited – and still gives him more personality than most talking characters manage. Lana Condor, Tone Bell, Luis Guzmán, Martha Kelly and P.J. Byrne round out a capable supporting cast, while Cena seems to relish playing against type as a smug, litigious antagonist.
The blend of animation and live action holds up reasonably well throughout; the seams show occasionally, but rarely enough to break the film’s momentum. The slapstick is sharply timed, which counts for more than polish, and the film is funniest when it fully commits to the absurdity of a courtroom weighing a coyote’s pain and suffering with a straight face, rather than winking at the audience every few minutes.
The legal-drama scaffolding is fairly generic, and one or two emotional beats are pushed harder than they need to be. These are minor blemishes on a film that had every excuse to coast and chose not to. Coyote vs. Acme is smarter and warmer than its premise suggests, and well worth the three-year wait. Simply put, this is an absolute delightful from start to fisnish.
