
After Acme products fail him one too many times in his dogged pursuit of the Roadrunner, Wile E. Coyote decides to hire a billboard lawyer to sue the Acme Corporation.
Troll Court Entertainment, Keylight Pictures, Warner Animation Group, Warner Bros. Pictures
$72,000,000
It may not look the way classic animation fans want it to look. Still, *Coyote vs. ACME* is worthwhile for its ingenuity in both its homage to old cartoons and its clever storytelling, and seeing where your favorite *Looney Tunes* character fits into this wacky universe.
Come to think of it, I'm surprised that in the super-litigious US of A it took almost a century for anyone to cotton that "ACME" products were rubbish! Well now "Wile E. Coyote" has had his fill of things blowing up in his face and decided to employ lawyer "Avery" (Will Forte) to take on the mighty "Foghorn Leghorn" and his legal eagle "Buddy" (John Cena) in a courtroom battle. The coyote can't speak; they can't catch the "Road Runner" to act as a witness to his calamities and the thrust of their defence seems to fall on the deaf ears of an "Elmer Fudd" who doesn't seem to quite know which side his bread ought to be buttered on - or maybe he does? Can they win? I actually rather enjoyed the "Leghorn" character most of all as he rather counter-intuitively suggested that their gadgets and gizmos were being tested on the cartoon characters - rather than real people - because, well you can't actually kill "Bugs" or "Daffy" or any of the annoying pigs. Fair point, I thought! Not the point that "Avery" wants to concede though as their shenanigans proceed amidst any excuse to revisit old episodes from the frequently disastrous encounters between cat and bird on that now famous stretch of road/bridge/tunnel - or wherever it could go wrong. I suppose the issue for me here was that I was just never really a fan of the "Looney Tunes" characters growing up: the speaking ones usually just irritated me and these coyote ones repitiously trotted out similar scenarios to "Tom & Jerry" only without any sort of amiable personification. That said, this still serves quite effectively as a little time capsule of the history of Hollywood animation and with Cena and the strutting southern gentleman rooster on clucking form, this is a neatly wrapped piece of comedy nostalgia.