Coyote vs. Acme review
By Joel Humphries · Watched 09.01.26
★★★½ 3.5 / 5
Spoiler-free review
Coyote vs. Acme turns Wile E. Coyote’s lifetime of defective purchases into a courtroom comedy, mixing live action and animation with enough craft and affection to justify its long-delayed release. I had fun with it, even if I wanted a much bigger helping of the wider Looney Tunes world and never became especially invested in the human characters. John Cena also feels conspicuously like John Cena wandered into the movie. Still, this escaped the studio vault for a reason: it is an enjoyable movie worth seeing.
Full review — contains spoilers
I liked this, though probably not as much as everybody else in my group, and part of that is that I was never very tied to Wile E. Coyote. I was not one of those kids watching the cartoons hoping the Coyote finally won. I thought he deserved to lose. He’s the one relentlessly trying to murder the Road Runner, who isn’t bothering him. Wile E. decides over and over again that he’s going to dedicate his entire existence to catching this bird, and then every Acme product he buys blows up in his face. That always seemed fair enough to me.
The movie takes the position that maybe Acme bears some responsibility for selling this guy all these defective products, so Wile E. hires a struggling attorney, played by Will Forte, and sues the company. This is one of those live-action and animation combinations Hollywood used to make a lot more often. Who Framed Roger Rabbit is the obvious classic. You had Space Jam. You had all sorts of movies where actors stood around interacting with things that weren’t actually there. I like that kind of movie, and this one was well done.
I’m also glad it finally got released, because there was that whole battle with the studio when Warner Bros. decided it might make more money on a tax write-off than on actually putting the movie out. The finances are the finances, and the people putting up the money get to make decisions about their property, but it still sucks for everybody who spent years making the thing. So I’m glad it escaped and people got to see it. The basic premise is interesting. What I wanted was more of the larger Looney Tunes world. I don’t know what kind of access they had to these characters or what restrictions there may have been, but if you’re already putting me in this universe, give me more Bugs Bunny, give me more Daffy Duck, give me Porky Pig, let all of them wander through the thing. The movie would have benefited from having more going on than just the Coyote. I also didn’t feel particularly tied to Will Forte or Lana Condor here. They’re fine. I just didn’t care much about their characters. And I’m really not sure why John Cena needed to be in this movie. He’s playing the Acme lawyer and he sticks out like a sore thumb to me. Every time he showed up I was very aware that John Cena was in my Looney Tunes movie, and it threw me off. I enjoyed this anyway. We had a good time. I’m glad it finally made it out there and I recommend that you go see it.