Like most of you, I grew up watching cartoons. For me, the best — and purest — series was always the Road Runner. Its true hero is not, of course, that smug, beep-beeping bird. It's his perpetually thwarted pursuer Wile E. Coyote, who, alone in the most stripped-down of deserts, endures the endless futility of a Beckett character. (In fact, the character was created at the same time as Waiting for Godot.)
Scheming yet inept, Wile E.'s so hellbent on catching the Road Runner that he keeps buying shoddy contraptions — rocket skates, self-guiding bombs, earthquake pills — from a corporation called Acme. Their misfires inevitably blow him up, clobber him with anvils or send him plummeting off a cliff.
The unreliability of these products inspired a witty 1990 New Yorker piece by Ian Frazier, "Coyote v. Acme," in which Wile E. Coyote sues Acme for damages. In turn, that piece inspired the terrifically entertaining new movie Coyote vs. Acme, which has finally turned up in theaters after Warner Bros., in a controversial, Acme-esque move, tried to shelve the finished film in order to claim a tax write-off.
Blending live action with animation, Coyote vs. Acme takes Frazier's piece and transforms it into a spoofing riff on the classic legal thriller — think The Verdict or Erin Brockovich — but one steeped in the surreal anarchy of Looney Tunes.
The story begins when the fed-up Wile E. decides to take legal action and hires an Albuquerque lawyer, Kevin Avery, played by Will Forte. Alas, the scruffy Avery proves to be a hangdog soul who fears failure so much that he only takes on small cases and settles them for a pittance.
Luckily, Avery's intern, Paige (Lana Condor), is an idealist. She pushes him into filing a massive suit against Acme, the world's most powerful company. Acme's run by the strutting toon Foghorn Leghorn and represented by killer lawyer Buddy Crane (that's John Cena) whose body seems to be bursting from his suit.
Soon, Avery, Paige and Wile E. go out looking for evidence and encounter numerous other Warner Bros. toons: Daffy Duck, Tweety Bird, pantsless Porky Pig, and, of course, the incomparable Bugs. Along the way, Team Coyote unearths a sinister Acme project named after Sisyphus, the mythic stone-pusher whose story anticipates the coyote's own futility. Over and over, Avery wants to throw in the towel.
Of course, one of the pleasures of Warner Bros. cartoons was their imaginative delight in shattering the laws of nature, often violently. Wile E. Coyote can get smooshed by a steamroller, pick himself up, dust himself off and inflate himself back to normal size. Coyote vs. Acme serves up a slew of delirious gags like this, several of them terrific, in which the flesh and blood characters face the same crazy universe as the toons.
Still, what works in a six-minute cartoon is exhausting in a feature film, which is why writer Samy Burch and director Dave Green do something the old Road Runner cartoons never did: They give their story a plot and a meaning and even some feeling.
We watch Avery develop a spine. We see Wile E.'s wistful longing beneath his Ahab-like obsession with the Road Runner. And we recognize the existential bond between the coyote and the roadrunner, the chaser and chasee, whose lives depend for their meaning on the presence of the other.
And needless to say, Coyote vs. Acme delivers a message about runaway corporate power, which may explain why viewers are enjoying it so much. Acme is the very archetype of today's mega-corporations that outsource jobs to cheaper countries, manufacture goods designed to last only until their warranties lapse, force you to wait on hold to talk to an AI bot and find it cost-efficient to pay off occasional lawsuits like Wile E.'s rather than change corporate practices. When the movie suggests that the courts and the Congress bow down to Acme's power, it's just saying what everybody knows.
Now, what was always great about old Warner Bros. cartoons was their gleeful irresponsibility. They were never sentimental or improving like Disney. And in this respect, anyway, Coyote vs. Acme violates the tradition. The movie celebrates Wile E. Coyote's willingness to fight on, even in the face of constant failure. I don't know about you, but I have to love any movie that's clever enough to turn Wile E. Coyote into a role model.
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