It's spring of 1998, and I'm on a band field trip to the Bugs Bunny Film Festival at the Neptune Theatre in Seattle. This wasn't a normal field trip. We left school early in a convoy of parents' minivans and didn't get back until well after the final bell. How much of a Looney Tunes geek do you have to be to organize something like that? The answer, apparently, is Mr. Luthans, the band teacher at Gateway Middle School.
At lunch we stop at the Wallingford Dick's Drive-In, where I decide it's an opportune time for a prank. When nobody is paying attention, I walk over to a pay phone, dial 911, and say something ridiculous along the lines of, "Help, there are a hundred fires on 43rd Street." Then I hang up and don't think much of it.
Until a fire truck and several police cars arrive.
I was right about one thing: nobody had seen me make the call. But while the police are investigating, I make the considerably less intelligent decision to tell a couple of friends what I'd done. One says, "That sounds pretty serious." The other says, "I don't know. I think we should say something."
They're messing with me, but I don't know that. "C'mon, guys. You can't say anything."
They don't. So I get away with a crime, climb back into a minivan, and head off to watch Looney Tunes.
At thirteen, I wasn't particularly grateful. I liked Looney Tunes, but sitting through hours of cartoons I'd already seen didn't exactly feel like the opportunity of a lifetime. I was much more interested in getting out of school, hanging around with my friends, and discovering how many times the theater would refill a large popcorn and soda. Nearly thirty years later, I have a little more appreciation for the fact that Mr. Luthans somehow convinced everyone involved that taking the Gateway Middle School band to Seattle to watch Bugs Bunny constituted a field trip.
Walking into COYOTE VS. ACME, I couldn't tell whether I was getting consequence-free slapstick or a movie using Acme as a stand-in for every defense contractor and pharma giant currently in the news. What showed up instead split the difference in a way I didn't expect: charming more than hilarious, and considerably more philosophically load-bearing than a movie built around exploding rocket skates has any obligation to be.
Acme's hidden initiative is called Project Sisyphus. So, in its own way, is Wile E.'s pursuit of the Road Runner — and the film treats the two as opposites rather than synonyms. For Acme, endless suffering is something to exploit: cartoon characters can survive punishment that would kill a human, so their misery becomes another stage of product development. For Wile E., the same endless striving is identity — failure doesn't drain the chase of meaning, because the chase is the only thing he does. He's also the one with the better claim on the myth. Sisyphus got eternity as a punishment; Wile E., a cartoon who's been falling off the same mesa since 1949 and always turns up for the next one, was most of the way there already.
The film seems to know exactly what it's protecting. Jeremy Slater has said that he and James Gunn deliberately kept the character silent and off the fourth wall, wanting the audience to feel him the way you feel a dog rather than laugh at him as a gag machine. A Wile E. who's in on the joke collapses into Bugs Bunny with worse aim. A Wile E. who isn't gets to be Sisyphus.
Kevin's version of the same loop has no myth attached to it, only a business model. Avery, Jones & Maltese doesn't try cases, it settles them — fast, for whatever keeps the lights on — and Kevin has built an entire professional identity around never finding out what happens if he pushes. He admits as much to Wile E. directly, in one of the film's few scenes where the joke stops: he used to have a clear goal too. He used to chase something, until he got burnt out on trying.
Wile E. never has to make that confession. He doesn't carry the memory of having once been a hungrier version of himself. Kevin does, which is worse. Harvard Law put him in the same room as Buddy Crane once; only one of them kept climbing. By the time Kevin is standing in front of Congress explaining why Wile E. deserves anyone's attention, he's really describing the man he stopped being: someone who picks himself back up no matter what happens, unafraid of the very failure Kevin, by his own account, got too scared to risk.
Wile E. pushes the rock without knowing there's a myth attached to it. Kevin has to notice the rock he put down years ago and decide to pick it back up. Both of them end up Sisyphus. Only one of them had to choose it again.
Pull back far enough, and the whole movie is already sitting inside Frazier's original piece, waiting to be inflated. His 1990 New Yorker column is an invented legal filing from an attorney named Harold Schoff in a Tempe, Arizona courtroom, cataloging eighty-five separate Acme purchases gone wrong in legal diction that never winks at how silly its contents are. There's no trial, no firm, no rival lawyer, no Congress, and no Project Sisyphus. But there is this: Schoff argues that Acme holds "a virtual monopoly" over the goods Coyote's work requires, and wonders how a company gets away with victimizing a captive consumer this badly, over and over, with no alternative supplier in sight.
The movie gives Kevin nearly the same argument in front of Congress: Acme has a monopoly over every tool Wile E.'s work requires. So even in Frazier's original joke, this isn't merely a story about a hapless predator buying bad gadgets. It's a story about a captive customer. The movie didn't have to invent that idea. It only had to build a plot large enough to hold it.
None of this works without a cast willing to play it straight. Forte's Kevin runs on a kind of practiced defeat that keeps edging toward Droopy Dog — fitting, since Droopy is also a Tex Avery character, and Forte's flattest line readings land closest to the film's biggest laughs. Cena, playing against his own body for once, turns Buddy Crane's charm into something closer to a weapon: every reassurance he offers sounds like a threat wearing a good suit. Condor's Paige has the most old-fashioned job in the movie, playing the one person onscreen who hasn't given up on any of this yet, and the film needs her to sell that earnestness or the third act collapses. Eric Bauza voices nearly everyone else — Bugs, Daffy, Foghorn, Porky, Elmer, Tweety, the Road Runner — which makes Wile E. the one character even his own voice actor isn't allowed to touch. The silence holds all the way into the sound booth. The one performance that doesn't fully land is Foghorn himself: Bauza gets the cadence, not the burr, and it's specific enough to be worth naming. Foghorn was built off Senator Claghorn, a blowhard radio-politician caricature from the 1940s, which makes it almost too neat that this Foghorn ends up in front of Congress running the exact playbook Claghorn was invented to mock — nothing illegal happened, progress requires sacrifice. Nobody had to invent that irony. Senator Claghorn wrote it eighty years early.
The performances aren't even the deepest cut. The law firm itself, Avery, Jones & Maltese, is a tribute built into the plot rather than dropped in the background: Tex Avery, Chuck Jones, and Michael Maltese, three foundational figures in the Warner cartoon tradition — Jones and Maltese being the pair who created Wile E. and the Road Runner — now running Wile E.'s law firm decades later. Dr. Lorre is a caricature of Peter Lorre, a favorite target of the original shorts' sense of humor. And Wile E.'s business card, Have Brain, Will Travel, is running the same joke Paladin's did on Have Gun – Will Travel, with the weapon swapped for the thing the character was supposed to have all along. A cheaper version of this movie skips all three. This one built its own law firm out of trivia and dared you to notice.
None of this needed a metaphor. In November 2023, Warner Bros. Discovery shelved a finished film that had tested well, the product of years of work from hundreds of people, preferring a roughly $30 million tax write-off to releasing it. It was the third nearly or fully completed movie the studio had killed this way — and this one was already finished when the decision came down. The calculation was never that the film wasn't good. The calculation was that it could be worth more on a different ledger if nobody saw it. That's Project Sisyphus's whole philosophy with the serial numbers filed off: something with real, felt value gets converted into a line on a different kind of ledger, and the conversion is completely legal. Foghorn's own defense to Congress — "nothing we've done today or any other day is illegal" — is available to Warner Bros. Discovery too, word for word.
So which is it, cathartic or subversive? The shelving saga argues both sides at once. It's subversive because the joke was already sitting in the finished film when the studio that financed it went and became the joke's real-world punchline. Project Sisyphus stopped being a premise and started looking like corporate procedure. It's cathartic, though, in a way that should make you a little uneasy. Warner eventually sold the worldwide rights to Ketchup Entertainment for a reported $50 million, and Ketchup turned the whole ugly history into part of the pitch: "The Movie Acme Doesn't Want You to See." The system even found a way to sell us the story of beating the system.
Even the plot won't pick a side. Congress declines to pursue federal charges, an institutional shrug that rhymes uncomfortably with the real studio's calculation, and the movie only gets its ending because someone leaks the evidence and forces a correction nobody official was going to volunteer. Off-screen, the film survived only after public outrage and somebody else finally decided it was worth buying. That's not exactly a hopeful ending. It's a description of how much it can cost to make one of these stories turn out right, on-screen and off.
Nothing about the way the movie looks is chasing this particular year. The desert is the same mesa-and-butte Southwest Chuck Jones was drawing in 1949, unchanged because it never needed updating in the first place. Paige mentions, almost as an aside, that Acme makes her phone too, but the film doesn't linger on a screen long enough to date itself the way most contemporary comedies manage within a year of release. Even the animation was built the old way first: poses sketched by hand before anything got rendered, the CG following the drawing rather than replacing it. None of that guarantees the movie holds up twenty years from now. But it's the kind of choice that ages on its own terms instead of the calendar's, and that's the real difference between a movie that looks dated and one that only looks like it was made a while ago.
The jokes are the one place the movie's ambition doesn't fully follow through. Kevin telling a court stenographer "please don't write that down," three times in a row until the joke is the repetition itself — that's a bit legal comedies have been running since long before this one. So is the ironic flash-cut: someone asks whether Kevin's really taking on the biggest corporation in the world, cut to Kevin, on the news, having done exactly that. These aren't bad jokes. They're jokes any workplace comedy already owns, dropped into a movie that also came up with Project Sisyphus and leaves enough room for a fairly surprising reading of Camus.
The film's thematic imagination and its comedic imagination are operating at two different registers, and only one of them is bespoke. I laughed, reliably, about once every ten minutes — enough that the movie never feels humorless, but not nearly what I expected from Looney Tunes. What you get instead is a movie that thinks harder than it makes you laugh, and that's a real trade, not a wash.
I went into COYOTE VS. ACME the same way I went into that Neptune Theatre field trip at thirteen: mildly obligated, expecting the cartoons I already knew, not much more. What I got instead was a movie that kept turning out to be about the thing right in front of it and something else underneath: a $300 rocket-skate case and a monopoly complaint, a product line and a research program, a cartoon's oldest joke and a myth he'd already been living inside the whole time. None of that stopped it from being a Looney Tunes movie as well, competently silly in exactly the ways the marketing promised, with a Road Runner who still says nothing but beep and still wins every time. It doesn't need the Sisyphus reading to work as a movie. It works better with it, which isn't the same thing as needing it, and that difference is the whole trick.
Somewhere around the fifth rocket sled, I thought about a thirteen-year-old who couldn't have cared less whether Wile E. Coyote ever caught anything, and who definitely wasn't thinking about Camus. I'm not sure he would now, either. But he'd have recognized this ending anyway: the guy who keeps getting back up, for no reason anybody in the audience needs explained to them, because that's the only version of the character anyone would recognize. Warner Bros. tried to bury this movie and failed. Acme keeps selling Wile E. products that fail and keeps getting away with it. He keeps buying them anyway. The people worth rooting for keep losing on schedule and showing up again the next morning. I don't know what that says about the people who keep showing up to watch them. I know I did.
Final Verdict: 89 out of 100