by Cain Noble-Davies
Worth: $18.50
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Will Forte, John Cena, Lana Condor, Luis Guzman, PJ Byrne, Eric Bauza (voice)
Intro:
… end-to-end impressive entertainment value and poignancy …
Coyote Vs. Acme is the closest that any mainstream film to date has gotten to recapturing the beautiful energy of Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, and the fact that it very nearly didn’t see release at all might as well be an insanity plea on the part of Warner Bros.
While films like Chip ‘n Dale: Rescue Rangers were able to recreate Roger Rabbit’s hybrid visuals, Coyote Vs. Acme taps directly into the cartoon deconstruction that made that film into a classic; taking the staples of the Looney Tunes standard, from wanton violence to consistently-malfunctioning gadgets to an underlying understanding that all this carnage is acceptable for fictional characters, and using them to speak on very real truths and injustices happening in the real, non-animated world. And where Roger Rabbit used cartoon hjinks as metaphor for historical attempts to monopolise mass transport and the displacement of ‘coloured’ neighbourhoods and communities in the process, Wile E. and company are going after a target as illusive as that damn Roadrunner: the corpos (perhaps the same ones at Warner that wrote-off this project in the first place).
The integration of 3D-as-2D animation and live-action footage has rarely looked better. The worldbuilding concerning Acme and its ubiquity in modern technology elevates the story, but the visuals brilliantly balance classic explosive slapstick and eerie conspiratorial drama. To put it in movie terms, it presents itself like Harvey but carries itself like Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, allowing both sides to compliment each other while excelling on their own.
Wile E. Coyote’s madly-driven tinkering and scheming is as gut-bustingly fun as ever, but always underlined with the understanding that beneath his obsession with catching one blue bird, there is a genuine intellect lurking inside that frequently-blasted head. For a character so synonymous with failure, there’s commendable effort made here to allow the starving canine his dignity. Once it gets around to digging into his relationship with the Roadrunner, it is truly astounding how well it hits those emotional beats without betraying either character’s core personalities.
From its release poster onwards, there are frequent references made to the legend of Sisyphus, the bloke condemned to forever push a boulder up a hill. And the script by May-December’s Samy Burch effectively links that struggle with that of Wile E.’s lawyer Kevin Avery (Will Forte in one of his best turns), both fighting against seemingly impossible odds to accomplish their goals. Acme, as represented by John Cena at his most enjoyably punchable as hard-arsed defender Buddy Crane, fits the bill for a company so big that battling them feels like you’re up against the natural elements, but in the face of both personal embarrassment and later allegorical reveals of animal abuse as ‘the price of progress’ (producer/co-writer James Gunn once again backing the horse defending all other horses, much like Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol. 3), it’s a fight that must be fought.
But even more so than Sisyphus, the legend that this whole film ultimately speaks to is one much more modern than the yarns of the ancient Greeks.
In Wile E. Coyote, we see a creature of habit trying to fill his belly in a world basically designed to work against them at every turn. Yes, the Roadrunner is still an almost-cosmic godlike force of toon carnage, but the film is more interested in targeting an industrial complex for whom ‘act of God’ is little more than additional paperwork.
In Kevin Avery, we see a man resigned to working in the dregs of the legal system, initially strongarmed into taking on Wile E. Coyote to begin with. But as the damn-near Watergate levels of subterfuge unfurl themselves around him, he recognises the legal and business sectors as interlinked and built on disregarding and disenfranchising those like Wile E. just to make the profit line go up.
Two bipedal lads knowing full well that winners are a select group seemingly out of their reach… and still deciding to fight against those odds because it’s the only thing that makes sense to them.
There are few mainstream films in recent years that can measure up to the sheer volume of American idealism at the heart of this story, and even from across the ocean, there’s something quite infectious about its inspirational slant on the repetition of chasing the one who meeps.
Coyote Vs. Acme is easy to enough to appreciate merely for existing as more than just a literal write-off, but its end-to-end impressive entertainment value and poignancy makes it even easier. As updated Looney Tunes antics, it can hold its own against any of the brand’s classic shorts and features. As an oddball legal drama peppered with Big Tech intrigue, it does justice to the original New Yorker article in its just-serious-enough take on such an outlandish premise. But its real power comes through its ability to combine two classic staples of American fiction (old-school cartoons and ‘one man against the system’ courtroom yarns) to give a startlingly clear-eyed depiction of the American Dream, both the chasmic lengths that must be leaped to try and grab for it, and the hardened drive it takes just to make the attempt. It echoes the tragic strokes of ‘The Coyote Gospel’ from Grant Morrison’s run on Animal Man, which repainted a Wile E. Coyote stand-in as a religious martyr, but with an adamance that one’s suffering need not be in vain. We don’t need to imagine Sisyphus happy, so long as he has friends like these.
