REVIEW: COYOTE VS. ACME

The secret weapon of The Looney Tunes has always been their natural eloquence with meta-textuality. Seriously. Go rewatch "Duck Amuck." It's high art. That trick isn't really new here in a landscape where "self-awareness" is just generally baked into the fabric of most millennial media.

But Coyote vs Acme nonetheless feels cut from a very different cloth. I don't even know if that's from anything extra this film does so much as what it doesn't do. This movie never feels like it's trying to prove how much smarter it is than the audience. It doesn't feel smug or self-promoting.

Like, it takes a different kind of self-awareness to look at how many times a certain Wile E. Coyote has tried to get his hands around a certain speeding bird and ask if maybe the poor guy, who has literally tried everything under the sun, has just had the odds stacked against him. It takes a certain kind of movie to decide that this dude just needs someone to speak up for him.

Don't be scared if it's been a while since you've seen anything Looney Tunes. The movie is about as user friendly as the Mario film, and runs on a sturdier engine of character, and the lore isn't super convoluted anyhow.

A movie with pianos dropping from the sky and exploding rocket boots forecasts a very specific kind of tone and humor--this movie is all that. Look forward to Will Forte bellyflopping in the motel pool and other such shenanigans.

But there's a lot more to a fireworks show than just setting striking matches on everything, and this film's handling on humor is anything but unhinged. This is a very smart movie, a movie that gives no explanation as to how Elmer Fudd became a U.S. senator because that's not the weirdest thing going on in politics in the real world if you think about it ...

A lot of this elegant humor also comes down to the instincts of the live-action cast, who give no indication that they realize they're living in a world of cartoons. They do not recognize that the voice of their mysterious caller belongs to a certain cartoon celebrity with quite the history behind him. That connection is ours to savor alone.

Will Forte is perfectly in his element. You see the expired idealist inside of him that only needs to stretch his legs a little. Lana Candor's role as the champion of hope and perseverance is familiar but necessary, and Candor plays it without any hint of fatigue or irony. John Cena, meanwhile, has never been less likeable, which I'm sure is exactly what he intended.

It seems that each generation only really gets one singular Who Framed Roger Rabbit, and this is ours. Yes, I am aware that there have been some projects in the last decade that have employed both live-action and animated devices, and even some that have made bids for #relevance, like that "Chip & Dale" gag, and I seem to recall that we got a "Tom & Jerry" movie in the last five years. (I also feel like it's fair to wonder whether or not it would have been too much to ask for these icons to be rendered in their native traditional hand-drawn animation. Surely they didn't choose CG imitations for tax reasons?)

But dropping cartoon characters into a photographed environment? That's always been the easy part. Meta-jokes? Anyone can do them. And they are capable of and deserving of much more than the bare minimum, as Coyote vs. Acme reminds us so intelligently.

--The Professor

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