Coyote vs. Acme Review

Ian Frazier's 1990 New Yorker piece imagined Wile E. Coyote's grievance against Acme written up as a legal filing, and Dave Green's film, from a Samy Burch screenplay developed with James Gunn and Jeremy Slater, keeps that deadpan. Will Forte plays Kevin Avery, a personal injury lawyer who settles everything because he lost his early trials; the coyote refuses to settle, which puts Kevin in court against John Cena's Buddy Crane, his old Harvard rival. Green's models were The Insider and Erin Brockovich, played straight with cartoons as plaintiffs.

The hybrid work is lovely. DNEG's cel-shaded coyote sits inside Brandon Trost's New Mexico exteriors as if he were lit on set, Bugs Bunny is drawn entirely in 2D. The gags land when the humans refuse to wink, but the joke is thinner than the runtime, the cast plays types, and the congressional hearing at the climax pours on the sincerity until the film stops being funny.

Warner Bros. Discovery finished the film, shelved it in 2023 for a tax write-off and sold it to Ketchup Entertainment for about 50 million dollars, which makes its rescue easy to root for, and it has reached 100 million dollars worldwide. The story of the film is better than the film: a handsome, good natured comedy that runs out of jokes long before it runs out of courtroom.