Review: 'Coyote vs. Acme' brings Looney Tunes into the courtroom, for a comedy that's relentlessly funny and sometimes sweet

As someone who grew up on Warner Bros. cartoons, it’s an electric experience to see that someone else — namely, the makers of the animated/live-action comedy “Coyote vs. Acme” — are as obsessed and enamored of the Looney Tunes characters as I am.

The movie, inspired by Ian Frazier’s comic short story in The New Yorker, starts with that nonspeaking predator, Wile E. Coyote, in his endless pursuit of the Road-Runner, beep-beeping across the New Mexico desert. Each time, Coyote deploys one of the many products of the Acme Corporation, and each time the device fails miserably. 

After a few thousand of these attempts, Coyote has had enough. He sees an ad for a lawyer in Albuquerque, Kevin Avery (Will Forte), who specializes in getting small settlements from Acme for his ‘toon clients. (His law firm is Avery, Jones and Maltese — named for Tex Avery, Chuck Jones and Michael Maltese, three of the creators of the original Looney Tunes shorts.) Against Kevin’s advice, and spurred by Kevin’s niece and intern, Paige (Lana Condor), Coyote throws every Acme product he’s ever bought into a giant lawsuit.

The size of Coyote’s lawsuit draws the attention of Acme’s slick head lawyer, Buddy Crane (John Cena), who offers a settlement that Kevin accepts but Coyote tears into pieces. Coyote wants to go to trial, for reasons that go beyond the legal. 

Meanwhile, Acme’s CEO wants this case to go away before Kevin and his firm learn too much about the corporation’s less savory practices — particularly a program called Project Sisyphus. The CEO is Foghorn Leghorn, and it’s a stroke of brilliance by screenwriter Samy Burch (an Oscar nominee for writing the Natalie Portman/Julianne Moore drama “May December”) that the rooster is depicted as a cartoon version of John Huston’s character in “Chinatown.”

In the movie’s opening, we learn how far Acme will go to keep secrets, even putting their top scientist, Dr. Lorre (from Jones’ 1946 classic “The Hair-Raising Hare”), in a portable cartoon hole. It’s one of many gags and references running through this cleverly laugh-packed movie, which manages to find a place for most every Looney Tunes character — Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Tweety, and even the more problematic ones. (The movie devises the only joke one could safely make in this day and age about Pepe Le Pew.)

What’s more, “Coyote vs. Acme” shows the heart beneath the endless chase between Wile E. Coyote and the Road-Runner. If you don’t think the relationship between two characters who speak a single word between them (“beep”), you’re in for a beautiful surprise.

It defies belief that we came so close to not getting to see the movie at all. When the movie was finished two years ago, the executives at Warner Bros. — the ones who thought “Space Jam: A New Legacy” was a good idea — planned to shelve “Coyote vs. Acme” as a tax write-off. Thankfully, fans forced the suits to sell off the distribution rights to a smaller company, Ketchup Entertainment, and we get to see this inventive and warm-hearted movie for ourselves. Strap on your rocket skates and get to the theater quickly.

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‘Coyote vs. Acme’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, August 28, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG for cartoon violence. Running time: 103 minutes.