Coyote still hasn’t caught the Road Runner, so he sets his Acme binoculars on a new sort of quarry: the Acme company itself. Coyote vs. Acme contains plenty of anvils that parents should be mindful of: Characters utter some mild curse words, engage in some sensual asides and engage in plenty of violence. But the film is also hilarious and surprisingly sweet.
Wile E. Coyote and the Acme company go way, way back.
For decades, Mr. Coyote has been buying Acme-brand products in his pursuit of the Road Runner: Acme jets, Acme anvils, Acme dehydrated boulders, Acme instant holes, Acme earthquake seeds.
Where does a coyote get this sort of cash? It’s a mystery. Perhaps the Internal Revenue Service should investigate. But no matter: Coyote sends Acme money. Acme sends Coyote products. Coyote uses those products to—well, not catch the Road Runner.
Sometimes it’s Coyote’s own fault. Even the most genius-level canines should probably not strap themselves to rockets. But let’s face facts: The reliability of Acme products ranks somewhere below the communist-made Trabant automobile and only slightly above the Nintendo Power Glove. The jets backfire. The boulders hydrate too instantaneously. The less we say about the earthquake seeds, the better.
Coyote has been as loyal a customer as Acme has had in the company’s long history. But even his brand loyalty has limits. You can only have your own anvil dropped on your head so many times before you must reconsider your purchasing habits.
And then, in a moment of animated serendipity, Coyote sees Kevin Avery, attorney-at-law, on television.
“Have you ever set a big stack of TNT on the road, hoping to blow up your nemesis, but when you press the detonator, the detonator itself explodes?” Kevin says. “It’s not your fault. There’s probably someone to blame.”
And who is that somebody? Acme, that’s who.
After so many, many years chasing the Road Runner, Coyote suddenly has another goal in mind: He’s going to sue Acme.
It won’t be easy. Acme is the biggest business conglomerate in the world. It has the deepest of pockets and a hot-shot corporate attorney named Buddy Crane. But perhaps with Kevin Avery on his team, Coyote might topple mighty Acme. Time for someone else to suffer a comically huge bump on their metaphorical head.
Hate to break it to Coyote, but Kevin’s probably not the ideal lawyer for this sort of work. Oh, he’s fine suing Acme for nickel-and-dime stuff. But this is different. “Do I look like a guy who would take on the biggest corporation in the world?!” he says.
But circumstances force Kevin to be that guy. And—with some help from his niece and intern, Paige—he ultimately comes to embrace it. Acme is indeed up to some cartoonish shenanigans. And Kevin ultimately risks his business and career in order to hold the company to account.
Coyote isn’t the easiest guy to root for, either. He’s been a bit of a villain for the last seven or eight decades, after all—even if you feel a little sorry for him. But in Coyote vs. Acme, our title character becomes a lovable loser, a Charlie Brown who can never quite kick the football Lucy’s holding. More than that, he’s embraced as a paragon of determination.
He’s not afraid of failure, someone says about Coyote. “No matter what happens, he picks himself up, and he tries again and again.” That’s a nice little message there—to keep pushing forward when circumstances set you back. And when we can instill that same sense of grit into our own little coyotes, it sets them on the path to success (Acme influence notwithstanding).
Other cartoon characters pop up here and there, and sometimes they express an unexpected affection for one another. They may be cartoons, but they’re drawing on deeper emotions. (Rim shot please.)
Witch Hazel—a green-skinned, pointy-hatted, broom-riding Looney Tunes character—makes a quick cameo. Kevin and Coyote meet a potential source on 666 Scary Road Drive. A psychiatric hospital for cartoon characters is named St. Looney’s. Someone says, “God bless America.” We hear about an Acme program called Project Sisyphus, named after a character in Greek mythology doomed to spend eternity pushing a rock up a hill (only to watch it roll down again when he nearly reaches the top).
Coyote vs. Acme tries to get some chuckles out of Looney Tunes’ characters’ mode of dress (or lack thereof). When Coyote walks into an office setting, someone references his “clothing optional” style. Later, Kevin and Coyote set an appointment with someone who they hope may help their case. But the potential source mistakes Kevin for a “nude model” he requested.
“Take your pants off,” the painter asks—referencing, it would seem, the habit of cartoon characters to go bottomless. “Disrobe and pretend you’re thinking,” the painter later adds. Later, Porky Pig announces that he’s the model for the “pants-less modeling gig.”
When Kevin and Coyote investigate the disappearance of a scientist they believe can help their case, they talk with the man’s wife. (They had “87 years together,” she says.) the woman adds that people told her that her hubby ran off with a secretary. “But I don’t think so,” the woman says. “His secretary was a penguin.” She also shows off some of her husband’s most helpful inventions, including “predator spray.” When she announces its existence, the famously amorous cartoon character Pepe Le Pew bounds into the picture—only to fall out of the picture when sprayed.
As a lawyer makes an impassioned, patriotic speech, one of the jurists (the chicken Miss Prissy, for you Looney Tunes fans) announces that she “just laid an egg,” her tone of voice implying some level of sexual arousal. A duck loses all his feathers and thus appears “naked” in front of the cameras. A cartoon covers his suddenly bare behind with hastily grabbed fur.
If you’re familiar with Looney Tunes cartoons at all—especially the Road Runner/Coyote cartoons—you know their humor largely depends on violence. But you also know that this violence is treated as more of an annoyance than anything truly harmful. “My clients go boom, and two seconds later, they’re fine,” Kevin admits. “Nobody cares!”
Still, the characters here go boom, and splat, and squish, and clang an awful lot here. We can’t detail every instance of mayhem, but here’s a sampling:
Coyote jumps or falls off a cliff several times—including four or five times on purpose to make a point to Kevin. He blows himself up at times and is hit by both a semi-truck and a speeding train. He does his best to carry a variety of weapons and explosives into the courtroom. And the movie treats us to some of his most memorable, and violent, mishaps from old Looney Tunes cartoons. One explosion seems to injure him badly—judging by his appearance as he crawls out of a massive, bomb-caused crater. We see him add one or two of his own teeth to a cup full of them. He gets smashed against a hotel wall by his own room’s bed, squashed into the shape of a living accordion and set on fire at least once.
Other cartoon characters are hit with wrecking balls, have their feathers stuck in slime (which then must be ripped off) and choked. A woman demonstrates the effectiveness of an “anti-lump pump” that cures ludicrously oversized lumps on one’s head. She does so, however, by hitting herself on the head (and causing a ludicrously oversized, but temporary, lump). Tweety Bird is squeezed by a human character until his eyes nearly pop out. An evil lawyer snaps a sentient cartoon pencil in half. A character is catapulted out of a building via ejector. And so on.
Human characters are threatened with lions, dehydrated boulders, cartoon explosions and other such issues. A man’s real car is flattened by a cartoon piano. A cartoon bomb is thrown into a building. We hear that a man was so mean that he once ate a lobster “while it was still alive.”
Bombs, rockets, grenades and piles of TNT litter the scenery. Characters drive without much regard to others. We see a spider roughing up another spider for cash.
We hear a couple of uses each of “d–n” and “h—, along with one of “p-ss”. In an homage to the original Road Runner cartoons, we see the bird’s supposed Latin name on screen that includes a profanity. God’s name is misused about three times.
Coyote communicates through literal signs—one of which just contains a series of meaningless symbols that indicate profanity. Someone flips a finger to a news camera, but the finger is pixelated.
We see an apparent jug of booze—so suggested by the quadruple X’s written on the label of the container. A cartoon character carries around a champagne bottle. Another pops open a bottle of bubbly that we’re supposed to assume is alcoholic, but it turns out to be sarsaparilla.
Acme brags that it’s a “company of family values that values its family of companies.” As mentioned, it’s hiding a secret. But so is one of the story’s apparent good guys. And when it’s discovered, that secret nearly ruptures the case and a formative friendship.
A cartoon cat sculpts a statue of his long-lost pal from kitty litter. The Tasmanian Devil slobbers all over a witness stand. We hear about an invention that erases “stinky lines” (cartoon lines that indicate a foul smell). A cartoon picks something out of his ear and eats it. When Kevin tries to check Coyote into a hotel room, the manager tells him, “No pets,” and says that she’s worried about Coyote urinating on the carpet. (Kevin threatens her with a discrimination lawsuit, which convinces her to let Coyote stay.)
A lawyer friend of Kevin’s is overheard shouting at someone on the phone. “Look, just pay me the money you owe me, or I’ll sue you for breach of contract!” he says. And then he adds in a nicer tone, “I’ll call you later, Mom!”
Kevin accuses Coyote of being “addicted” to trying to catch the Road Runner.
Looney Tunes cartoons have been around as long as, in some cases, our great-great grandparents. The first Looney Tunes short hit the screen in 1930, and Bugs Bunny made his debut in 1940. Wile E. Coyote himself has been around since 1949, outliving the average coyote by more than 70 years.
And while we may color all those Looney Tunes’ characters with nostalgia—forgiving those old cartoons for their unremitting violence, nods to alcohol, winks at sex and (unless they’ve all been censored now) occasional racism—we need to be honest: If Plugged In had been reviewing those older cartoons back in the day, we would’ve done our share of finger wagging.
Coyote vs. Acme totes most of those issues in its Acme-brand suitcase on its way to Albuquerque—and then stuffs a few others in its bathroom bag. The violence is just as prevalent (even if the film acknowledges that cartoon critters are more durable than we are). It contains some surprisingly modern ribald asides. And the swearing? It goes well beyond Yosemite Sam’s “frickin-frackin” obscenities. This film comes with some anvils that parents would be advised to watch out for.
But that said, Coyote vs. Acme is also sort of delightful.
The film embraces the zany humor that made those original Looney Tunes so much fun. It honors its longtime characters—and trots them all out here at a dizzying pace. It does something surprisingly deft in how it honors the past while updating the story for a new audience.
And it does something that most traditional Looney Tunes shorts never attempted: It makes you care.
The film focuses on two characters who never seem to win at anything: Coyote is perpetually stymied in his pursuit of the Road Runner. Kevin embraced his role as a less than mediocre lawyer long ago. One character finds the wherewithal to improve himself. The other—well, he doesn’t. But you wind up kinda respecting him anyway.
Families who are so inclined can take away some worthwhile lessons, too: Determination is to be celebrated. Friendships are priceless, even if those friendships look a little different. And never cross an angry rooster who runs a worldwide business conglomerate.
OK, so Coyote vs. Acme’s barrel of lessons may be a little thin. But the movie is fun, often hilarious and, at times, surprisingly sweet. And while the movie’s anvils cannot be overlooked, neither can its quality—or its heart.
Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.
