Coyote vs. Acme
Pissed off with the shoddy quality of their products, Wile E. Coyote finally lawyers up (Will Forte) and takes the Acme Corporation to trial.
You might know the story; the studio wanted to shit-can this film as a tax write-off and someone saved it from the brink and picked it up. It’s not hard to see why a massive mega-corp doesn’t want this satire about a massive mega-corp being released.
But released it was, and it’s pretty good! It’s a lovingly rendered live-action/animation hybrid that layers jokes upon jokes, but styles its narrative like The Parallax View1 or something. It’s in no small part a nod to Better Call Saul (Will Forte plays a sleazy lawyer, and the film is set in Albuquerque), then kind of morphs into a thriller and courtroom drama.
It lost me somewhere in the middle third. Perhaps I’ve had a rough night I dunno, but I was drifting off in the cinema there and fighting sleep. So don’t quiz me on it. Is that the film’s fault? Maybe I am just getting old and sitting in a dark warm room just sends me off. I think perhaps the feeling of pathos at the end felt quite predictable and I sort of checked out.
I loved Martha Kelly in it though as Forte’s obtuse assistant (“I’m at a crazy-golf tournament this weekend so I don’t know if I’ll be able to come in on Monday”), and having Foghorn Leghorn be the corrupt CEO who takes over the courtroom and starts to give a “simple country lawyer” type speech in his southern drawl was a stroke of genius. What really killed me was their use of Nobody Speak2 in the soundtrack, a great but notoriously sweary song, and how they chose to censor it.
I’m glad we finally got to see this. It’s a well aimed and funny “fuck-you” to these increasingly rich pricks we are being asked to worship. Hopefully I get to see it again after a few coffees.