Coyote vs. Acme (2026)

****/****
starring Will Forte, Lana Condor, Tone Bell, John Cena
screenplay by Samy Burch, based on the NEW YORKER article by Ian Frazier
directed by Dave Green

by Walter Chaw Towards the end of Coyote Vs. Acme, the evil corporate lawyer for the evil monolithic corporation ACME snaps a pencil dramatically, and director Dave Green cuts to a drawer full of cartoon pencils trembling in terror. The gag is there and gone in a flash, overshadowed by the elaborate stunts (both animated and live-action) flanking it, but it’s at the heart of why this movie fucks, as the kids say. Coyote Vs. Acme builds a world right next door to Robert Zemeckis’s Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, where cartoon characters exist as sentient, autonomous beings alongside mundane, flesh-and-blood humans. More fascinatingly, it shares space philosophically with Grant Morrison’s “The Coyote Gospel” (from a 1988 issue of Animal Man), in which a cartoon Coyote is cursed to die over and over again for the capricious pleasure of an unseen, all-powerful audience. And it ruthlessly skewers the hijacking of all aspects of American culture by corporate interests. In this film, Warner Bros.’ Wile E. Coyote is explicitly positioned as an existential metaphor for the Sisyphusian suffering of living in a time and place where judges, senators, et al., are bought, sold, and mandated to screw the little guy. (The bad guys’ nefarious plan is called “Project: Sisyphus,” natch.) A person’s value is calculated based on employment and income, and the underclass are used as subjects in wide-ranging technological experiments without their consent. Justice? Grow up. Because Coyote Vs. Acme, like the Looney Tunes and Merry Melodies cartoons that paved the way for it, lands its kill shots with such deadly precision and utter ebullience, it never feels like a lecture. It does, however, feel like that concert you went to last night of a band you loved thirty years ago, and damned if they don’t still got it. It feels like a sermon when the preacher’s riding shotgun with the Almighty.

Coyote’s sidekick is small-claims lawyer Kevin Avery (Will Forte, his character perhaps a distant relative of Tex Avery?), master of the insufficient settlement, whom Coyote retains as counsel in his suit against ACME for selling products that consistently fail to deliver on their promise. Imagine rocket skates that phut-phut-phut before going kablooey-blammo! Parachute bags stuffed with silverware. Black paint that seems to invariably conjure train tunnels in the instant before the train passes through. No need to imagine, as we are, in fact, witnesses to ACME’s malfeasance, having watched Coyote try and fail to capture his nemesis Road Runner with ACME hardware over the course of our lives. But what if ACME was manufacturing defective products on purpose? Avery, of strip-mall law firm “Avery, Jones & Maltese” (Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner’s creators are Chuck Jones and Michael Maltese), is willing to settle for the pittance ACME lawyer Buddy Crane (John Cena) offers his client. But Coyote, who has designs on finally capturing Road Runner when Road Runner is subpoenaed to testify on his behalf, insists on first a trial before corrupt judge Troppogrosso (Luis Guzmán), then a hearing before a corrupt congressional committee led, of course, by our most geriatric Looney Tune, Elmer Fudd (voiced by Jim Cummings). The CEO of ACME–the Judge Doom of the piece, if you will–is the blusterous good ol’ boy Foghorn Leghorn (Cummings again), who delivers closing arguments about the malleability–and immortality–of cartoon characters making them ideal test subjects, which, by that point, late in the movie, lands as chilling and inhumane. Familiar, too. We as a species have perfected the art of dehumanizing others for our comfort–and especially for material and political advantage. We victimize as a matter of habit; we commit atrocities as smoothly and anonymously as paying our taxes and showing up to work for the people responsible, who will never learn your name as they siphon away your life for pennies.

Coyote Vs. Acme is medicine coated in sugar, an inventive action film that has a scene where a human assassin launches a volley of anvils before hopping on a cartoon motorcycle in hot pursuit of another human with a cartoon refrigerator strapped to his back that’s vomiting up a stream of ice cubes so his skis will work on pavement. Its hero is a voiceless cartoon coyote; its Deep Throat is an American trickster god icon who burrows away at the end of his scene, causing the ground above him to mound and buckle and causing me to experience the variety of nostalgia-induced, full-body tingle I once got when a junk scavenger used the shell of an AT-AT for shelter on Tatooine. I don’t mind that Coyote Vs. Acme is a shaggy-dog riff on The Verdict, or that Lana Condor is cast as a perky, idealistic Oxford grad who believes in the rule of law–a Rose Tico archetype fast becoming one of my least-liked model-minority relics. I appreciated how lived-in this world feels, and that no one is standing around gaping at its physical wonders. I adored throwaway bits–the sign on a “looney bin” for the “looniest” toons, for example, paid off with Porky Pig’s disturbing recognition that he’s not wearing pants. And I love how, when everything is supposed to wrap up in a crowd-pleasing bow, screenwriter Samy Burch’s script throws a final, scabrous curve. Coyote Vs. Acme is a righteously angry film that plays as light and fun–a principled film most will never recognize as having any deeper thoughts at all. It’s a stealth missile. We call that kind of movie a masterpiece. No wonder Warner Bros., under a completely interchangeable, thumb-faced asshat of the moment, tried to kill it. Especially on the eve of a potential buyout by another pie-faced sociopath looking to complete a pocket fascist’s Ministry of Culture. Coyote Vs. Acme is so good, I wonder how dangerously extraordinary Bilall Fallah and Adil El Arbi’s Batgirl is, too.