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Barry Wurst: ‘Coyote vs. Acme’ is a Looney, moving masterpiece

The decades of abuse suffered by Wile E. Coyote, forever unsuccessful in his efforts to capture and devour the Road Runner, almost match the torture inflicted on Dave Green's "Coyote vs. Acme." Here's a movie, completed in 2023, that its studio infamously decided to shelve indefinitely, toss aside as a tax write-off and never release. Even worse, there were reports of a "funeral screening" for the cast and crew before it would be "erased."

Somehow, the film survived, with the heroic alternate company Ketchup Entertainment giving it a proper release and saving it from oblivion. The best news is that, after all it took for it to escape cinematic purgatory, the film is terrific.

Set in a world where humans and Looney Tunes characters coexist, the fed-up and hungry Wile E. Coyote hires an inexperienced attorney (played by Will Forte) to sue the Acme Corporation for selling him a giant cave's worth of ineffective products. The attorney representing Acme who aims to crush the coyote's case is Buddy Crane (John Cena), who matches the cartoonish villainy of Gaston from "Beauty and the Beast" (1991) in the best way.

What ensues is a legal thriller stuffed with cartoon characters -- imagine "The Lincoln Lawyer" (2011) or "Michael Clayton" (2007), but with falling anvils and talking animals. The opening bit showing a classic character's mental capacity being tested in real-time is such a riot it's unlikely a funnier movie will emerge in 2026.

One of my favorite bits from the original cartoons, where the coyote uses skis and a fridge strapped to his back as a one-man snowmobile, surfaces in a thrilling auto chase. Although Forte and scene-stealer Lana Condor both excel as the heads of the underdog legal team, the coyote is the film's star. Despite having no dialogue, Wile E. Coyote has so many moments where his facial expressions steal the focus.

Decades later, no film has matched the jaw-dropping brilliance of "Who Framed Roger Rabbit" (1988) in blending live-action and animation, but this comes the closest, as both films made me believe in a world where humans and cartoons share the same space. In addition to being witty, Green's film is a visual-effects tour de force. Seeing it twice is the only way to catch all the jokes.

Samy Burch's screenplay (from a story she co-wrote with Jeremy Slater and James Gunn) is not only rich with up-to-the-minute corporate satire but also manages to be nuanced in how it portrays the coyote, as Wile E. is a hero who always gets in his own way. I never considered how much I truly despise Foghorn Leghorn or that Porky Pig rarely wears pants.

Voice actor Eric Bauza is the film's VIP, as he voices most of the film's animated characters. (Bauza also gave a tour de force last year, voicing the two leads of the wonderful "The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie"). This is one of the few films that, the moment it ended, I couldn't wait to see again.

A four-star rating might seem too high for a film with an overly complicated plot and a second-act Daffy Duck cameo that doesn't work. However, "Coyote Vs. Acme" gets my highest marks for two big reasons: It took my all-time favorite Looney Tunes character and made the funniest vehicle possible, and on more than one occasion, it made me weep.

No joke, there's a moment here where someone tells the coyote what he does not want to hear, and the camera lingers on his crushed expression. It broke me, as did a moment where the Road Runner asks the coyote -- in his "meep-meep" way -- the question he needs to hear the most. OK, so it's not "The Shawshank Redemption" (1994), but this is a strangely moving film, on top of how knee-slappingly hilarious it is. That's what's up, doc.

(4 out of 4 stars)

Barry Wurst II is the founder of the Hawaii Film Critics Society and teaches film classes at University of Hawaii Maui College.