There are two things audiences likely know about Coyote vs. Acme: 1) that it involves the delightful premise of Wile E. Coyote suing the Acme Corporation for selling him dangerous products that always malfunction, like catapults and rocket boots; 2) that it was very unlikely they would ever actually see the movie. See, Warner Brothers didn’t like what they saw when the final version of Dave Green’s movie was submitted, and they sought to memory hole it by cancelling its release and taking a tax write-off.

Public outrage and bad press salvaged the film, which played at MIFF last month and was released in the U.S. a few weeks ago, distributed by Ketchup Entertainment rather than Warner Brothers itself. Now that it’s getting released in Australia, it’s our chance to see both how this enchanting idea is executed, and what made Warner execs gag when they saw the film and preferred the financial incentives of declaring it a total loss.

It’s possible to see both sides. While there are a lot of wild Looney Tunes antics in this film, and Looney Tunes aren’t as out of the zeitgeist as you might think (The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie was released just two years ago), there is a strange lack of momentum to this film. To put it in terms that use the visual language of Looney Tunes, it’s like a whirling dervish of legs moving so quickly that you can’t see them – but going nowhere.

Indeed, as captured in the classic Looney Tunes cartoons, Wile E. Coyote has never had any luck tracking down the Roadrunner in the deserts and canyons outside of Albuquerque, New Mexico. It’s a poor craftsman who blames his tools, but this coyote may have a point: Nothing he unboxes from the Acme Corporation ever performs the way it’s supposed to, and frequently leads to him exploding, or pancaking, or falling from a very great height, hitting the ground with a distant poof of dust.

So our intrepid coyote gets the idea to put the blame where it lies and receive some financial compensations for his lost money and numerous scrapes with death. He sees an advert for the firm of ambulance chaser Kevin Avery (Will Forte), who specialise in cartoon violence cases and usually settle for some pittance like $204, apparently enough of a sum to satisfy most clients and earn them a profitable business. Imagining a similar outcome here, Avery accepts the case and is surprised to see bigger dollar signs than usual from Acme head attorney Buddy Crane (John Cena). His client, though, tears the offer to shreds, prompting a trial that will likely get Wile E. nothing and will trigger Avery on his early career failures.

The story makes its way through several other courtrooms of increasingly greater magnitude, and involves a secret conspiracy at Acme where they knowingly tested their products on cartoons as a way of making them safer for humans. This involves the silencing and kidnapping of Dr. Lorre, a character based on the actor, Peter Lorre. And it gives a pretty good indication of how far in the past Coyote vs. Acme feels.

Peter Lorre, if you didn’t know, was the star of Fritz Lang’s M, a movie that came out in 1931. There was a character based on him in Looney Tunes because at that time, he was still a familiar cultural reference point. Nearly 100 years after M, today’s young people – in theory, the target audience for Coyote vs. Acme – not only don’t have any idea who Peter Lorre was, they might not even be that familiar with Bugs Bunny, one of the many Looney Tunes characters who makes an appearance here. Those Easter eggs are better meant for the parents in the audience, or maybe even the parents’ parents.

And it would be okay for Coyote vs. Acme to work only for them, because nostalgia goes a long way. But the film’s promising start and set-up devolves into a lot of narrative wheel-spinning. The central joke would work great as the length of a skit at star Will Forte’s formative job, Saturday Night Live, and perhaps doesn’t warrant 103 minutes worth of material.

The script is assembled professionally enough that each seen progresses logically from the one before, without ever burrowing deeper than surface level into the initial idea. That burrowing could have taken the form of back stories for the human characters, perhaps some breaking of fourth walls or looks deeper into the story’s more meta elements. As constructed, though, it plays out in very samey fashion, feeling flat in a way that goes beyond the two-dimensional animation of Wile E. and his cohorts.

And to be clear, the animation is the film’s charm, too. A CGI version of these characters would be an abomination, and there are enough cute and clever things done with the animation for it to feel like more than a Looney Tunes greatest hits. Just as one example, in sticking to the roots of the character, Wile E. can’t speak, so he holds up a seemingly unlimited quantity of signs when he can’t pantomime what he means. Of course, they’re not unlimited – when he offers one that is a nonsensical answer to the previous question, his next sign apologises for the limited number of signs.

This kind of thing is good for the odd grin, maybe more than that. The overall impression of Coyote vs. Acme, though, is of a slightly sweaty, significantly out-of-date artefact that would have been made more sense coming out around the time of the first Space Jam than the second. Suits at Warner Brothers who looked at it, and saw a failure, cannot be entirely blamed for their assessment. Coyote vs. Acme is not a failure, but neither is it an improbable triumph.

 

Coyote vs. Acme opens tomorrow in Australian cinemas.