Shelved for tax purposes then hauled back to improbable life – like its cartoon star Wile E Coyote – Coyote vs Acme made it through when Batgirl and Scoob!: Holiday Haunt fell by the accountancy wayside. But is it more than a “from the grave” resurrection sticking it to the bean counters? I laughed about ten times in the first 15 minutes, so it easily passes “the six-laugh test” – something I only heard about two days ago but understood without explanation. Test passed, in other words.
But, caveat alert, the film is funniest when it sticks closest to the tried and true. When an anvil is dropping out of the sky, kind of thing. The more it edges away from that, the shakier it gets. But edge away it must. At feature length there is space to fill and something is needed to fill it.
An article in the New Yorker fits the bill. It imagined bruised cartoon star Wile E Coyote taking the Acme company to court for providing him with so many defective products – rocket boots that are too rocket-y, magnetic gloves that are too magnetic and so on. And then pushes the 2D, entirely cartoon-y Wile E Coyote into Who Framed Roger Rabbit? style proximity with a live-action lawyer, played by Will Forte, who takes on the might of the Acme’s legal department, headed by John Cena.
In a David and Goliath court battle for the ages, director Dave Green and his team of animators remain meticulously faithful to the Looney Tunes style and ethos. Other Warners characters from the vault include Foghorn Leghorn, Porky Pig, Daffy and Elmer Fudd, creatures all from an alternate universe where different laws of physics obtain and coyotes can indeed crash to earth hundreds of feet below, dust themselves down and do it all over again.
They are uneasy bedfellows, the toons and hooms but Coyote remains satisfyingly mute throughout, sound effects doing the work of speech. Coyote’s case: Acme are a bad lot. Acme’s case: Coyote is an incompetent. Lawyer Kevin (Forte), much like his client, the try-hard who never gives up. Lawyer Buddy (Cena), like his, bigger and badder – the perks of working for what is described as the biggest corporation in the world.
In the background a subplot about Acme in the good old days, when their chief development officer – looking and sounding a lot like Peter Lorre and called Dr Lorre – tried to hold the company to ethical standards and got disappeared for his efforts. Turns out Acme is doing more than harming Wile E Coyote’s chance of getting fed, it’s also testing hazardous products on toons. Keep it light, guys!
Let’s not forget that the original cartoons were named in honour of their heroically elusive bird – like the 1965 short Roadrunner a Go-Go. At times it feels as if he/she/it has been forgotten about, though this is all dealt with towards the end, when Wile E Coyote’s devious plan to lure his nemesis into court becomes apparent and the film makes a feelgood point about the two creatures needing each other – like night needs day, or an anvil needs gravity.
And so, like Tom and Jerry, Wile E Coyote heads off into the closing credits locked in an eternal symbiosis of light-hearted, life-ending violence with a bird that goes “meep meep”. Happy endings all round, except perhaps for Warner Bros, who didn’t want to release the film at all and so handed it over to Ketchup Entertainment, who did pretty OK out of it. Maybe Ketchup should pitch for Batgirl too. The Scoob! movie, maybe not.
Coyote vs. Acme – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2026
