Dave Green’s cartoon courtroom comedy is funny, affectionate and unexpectedly touching. The corporate satire settles for easy targets, but the friendship between a coyote and his lawyer gives the silliness someone to care about.
The useful joke in Coyote vs. Acme is that someone has decided to treat cartoon injuries as a problem that might require compensation. Wile E. Coyote’s complaint against the corporation gives director Dave Green a reason to put Looney Tunes slapstick inside a courtroom comedy. It is a good, funny family film, with enough affection for its battered claimant to make the familiar legal plotting tolerable. Green understands the appeal of watching impossible things happen to bodies that can take it. He also makes the coyote worth spending time with between accidents.
Samy Burch’s screenplay gets considerable mileage out of letting the two sorts of comedy coexist. A faulty contraption can supply a physical joke and a reason to question the company selling it, without requiring a speech between the two. The company’s arrogance also provides jokes that do not require another explosion. We laughed at the explosive accidents, and then wanted somebody to take the coyote’s complaint seriously. The friendship with his lawyer gives that sympathy somewhere to go without requiring the film to abandon its foolishness.
Will Forte, as Kevin Avery, helps considerably. His performance keeps the human part of the film from becoming dead time between cartoon appearances, and he accepts the silliness without looking embarrassed by it. Green leaves room for warmth in a story that could have been entirely about finding new forms of injury. The coyote and the lawyer are likeable company, which matters when the court business begins to feel familiar.
Brandon Trost’s cinematography and Steve Arnold’s production design make the shared space for humans and cartoons convincing enough to sustain the joke. The live-action world has to remain legible while animated bodies ignore its rules, and for most of the film it does. There are moments when the two look less comfortably joined, but they do not undo the pleasure of the combination. The more successful passages allow the animated characters to disrupt the live-action scenes without making their human companions seem irrelevant.
Carsten Kurpanek’s editing gives the physical comedy a welcome briskness, although it cannot make every stretch of legal business equally lively. At 103 minutes, the film is short enough to remain agreeable and long enough for the courtroom conventions to start repeating themselves. Steven Price’s music contributes to the energy, but it is the timing of a sight gag that most often earns the laugh. Burch is less successful when she leans on the legal thriller than when she develops the friendship.
The corporate satire is less satisfying. Acme’s wrongdoing is an easy thing to oppose, and the film seldom makes that opposition uncomfortable or complicated. That keeps it accessible as family entertainment, but makes a premise built around corporate malpractice rather less pointed than it promises to be. Against the unruliness of the cartoons it honours, the feature can seem a little too well behaved. Green has made an amiable underdog comedy where there was room for something more mischievous.
An audience need not be fluent in Looney Tunes references to enjoy the company here. Eric Bauza’s roster of voices offers plenty for those who are, and the familiar characters retain their comic usefulness. The in-jokes are a bonus rather than homework, so there is no need to organise a childhood refresher course beforehand. Watch it with people who still laugh when cartoon machinery goes wrong.
