The glove is of course an Acme product to, as is everything Wile E. Coyote uses to catch the Road Runner. Alas, every device down to the last pair of rocket skates proves dysfunctional, backfiring and hurting the desert dog with one more violent indignity. It’s for this reason he eagerly takes up the command of a janky local law firm’s TV commercial to sue Acme for recompense. The law firm’s co-founder, Kevin Avery (Will Forte), is no crusader for the little guy, however. He’s a former Harvard Law alumni who has found himself comfortably washed out to bottom, filing small-ball claims against corporations that would happily rather settle for a few hundred dollars per accusation than deal with any serious litigation. And despite the idealism of his law school-studying niece, Paige Avery (Lana Condor), Kevin has no intention of really trying to hold the malfeasance of corporate America accountable.
Wile E. Coyote is a little more ambitious.
The canine will force his lawyer, kicking and screaming, to demand satisfaction for years of pain, humiliation, and hunger. Kevin will even come face-to-face with Acme’s high-priced legal team, including college nemesis Buddy Crane (John Cena) and the reigning rooster in the Acme hen house, Foghorn Leghorn. But the more Wile and Kevin dig into the company’s books, the more apparent a conspiracy exists that includes informants, missing celebrities, and corruption that goes all the way to Washington, D.C.
Right down to its title and the amusing bit where the film opens with a “Based on a True Story” title card, the cleverest thing about Coyote vs. Acme is how straight it plays its legal thriller trappings. The movie is a love letter to those who grew up watching Looney Tunes cartoons, yes, but it’s just as much a winking throwback to the kind of courtroom dramas and John Grisham potboilers which populated TNT when pint-sized millennials like a younger Dave Green were flipping between Looney Tunes on Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon.
These familiar beats in smoke-filled law offices and mahogany-encased halls of power gain an unexpected earnestness, too, thanks to the movie’s best live-action asset: Will Forte. A comedic character actor who never quite got his full due, even after an Oscar nomination for Nebraska and bragging rights for being your main man with the plan, MacGrubes, Forte pours deep pathos and insecurity into a middle-aged bloke who is terrified of one day gaining enough perspective to admit he became a loser somewhere along the way. There’s a needy pitifulness to the guy who, like the Coyote, never caught the grand prize he chased all his life.
It adds a foundation of sweetness to the film that gives the intentionally arch courtside melodrama something approaching substance. It also, perhaps less warmly, ends up the stronger half to a dramedy that struggles with the zany comedic elements that should be the core of the film.
