I can see why they wanted to can Coyote vs. Acme

When the world heard that a movie with a very promising concept -- that famous Roadrunner hunter Wile E. Coyote was suing Acme for their faulty products -- was being shelved by Warner Brothers so they could take a tax write-off, the outcry was swift and deafening. And for sure, I was part of that outcry. In addition to an idea that sounded good going down the drain, meaning I'd never see it, it was an ominous development to learn that a movie studio could just stymie the creative efforts of thousands of people, at what seemed like the drop of a hat. 

And then it started happening with other movies. I'm not sure if I actually have the sequence of events right here, but Batgirl was a very public casualty of the same mindset. There were others whose names I'm not remembering right now (and am apparently uninterested in doing a very simple Google search). 

But Coyote vs. Acme was not done. The bad press and public disappointment was so great that Dave Green's film was resuscitated. It opened in the U.S. a few weeks ago, about the time it was playing at the Melbourne International Film Festival. In fact, this film was so much of a curiosity that it played MIFF even though this is not the kind of movie you usually see at MIFF. 

And early word of mouth was good. A friend of mine raved about it on Facebook.

Well, I can see why they wanted to cancel it.

My wife and I watched this last Friday night, a screener version with my email address watermarked right into the center of the image. Pretty obnoxious. They could have put it in one of the corners and still achieved the desired impact of the watermark. I guess they thought some enterprising pirate might try to video the image and crop out a watermark in a corner? An absurd suggestion, but that's all I can think of.

Surely that played some small part of why it disappointed us. But the movie bore the lion's share of that disappointment.

Coyote vs. Acme starts out in a very promising manner. You get a montage of Wile E. Coyote's most spectacular equipment fails from his many dogged days pursuing the Roadrunner. (Meep meep.) Then you see him spot an ad for a local ambulance chaser (played, in what seemed like a very promising development, by Will Forte), and get the idea to sue Acme for product malfunctions that should have killed him a hundred times over. If not for the fact that he's, you know, indestructible.

It turns out this great idea is no greater than an idea for a seven-minute Saturday Night Live sketch. In fact, you can imagine an excellent version of that sketch, and it might have even starred Forte when he was a cast member.

And that gets at part of the issue with Coyote vs. Acme. Forte was on Saturday Night Live from 2002 to 2010, and even back then, the Looney Tunes were already starting to fade from the zeitgeist. To me personally, they're nowhere near it now. My wife and I asked my younger son to participate in the viewing, and he initially agreed when he thought we were talking about going to the cinema to see it, not that we meant "No, starting in the next 15 minutes." But if he had watched, I feel like he wouldn't have gotten any of the jokes or Easter eggs regarding this musty IP, and to be certain, whatever charm Coyote vs. Acme has relies on that sort of familiarity. 

There are other promising elements. John Cena plays Acme's lead attorney, a cowboy hat-wearing smooth talker, and I like him too. But like Forte, he ultimately feels wasted. 

And the problem is, everyone gets wasted because they are working so hard to turn a seven-minute idea into a 103-minute movie. Realizing they had so little, the filmmakers could have made this movie 85 minutes. That would have been perfectly fine. In fact, it probably still would have been 78 minutes too much, but it would have been better.

So what did they do with those extra 78 minutes, or rather, we should say, those extra 96 minutes? Unclear.

The movie doesn't even delve into back stories for its human characters. We know Forte's character is a bit lost because he lives in a motel. But we learn nothing about his family life or what brought him there. Cena, as the "villain," obviously doesn't warrant any such introspection either. Then there is Forte's assistant? legal clerk? who is played by Lana Condor, and she's on screen a lot but has no inner life. To say nothing of the fact that this actress, star of the To All the Boys movies, has zero charisma.

Instead this movie has a lot of "legs spinning fast, no forward momentum" -- both literally and figuratively.

Let's talk about the literal first. I thought I would be charmed by the Looney Tunes stuff, with things bouncing around the screen and characters receiving should-be-fatal injuries by blasting through walls or being flattened by pianos. But you know what, no. I was not. It felt tedious. Every time.

I should say that I don't really care for many of the previous movies done in this style. Like, I never liked Who Framed Roger Rabbit? all that much and I have still seen it only that one time in the theater. 

But strangely, I did quite enjoy Space Jam: A New Legacy, with Lebron James, a few years back. I don't like the original Space Jam, but the sequel really worked for me, even when it did not work for anyone else. 

A New Legacy tells us two things:

1) The Looney Tunes are, actually, sort of still in the zeitgeist. This movie is only five years old, and since it came out, there has also been The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie, released only two years ago. So in the context of Warner Brothers' continuance of the public visibility of its IP, Coyote vs. Acme is not totally out of left field. 

2) I myself have the potential to like the interacting of Looney Tunes characters and human beings, if it is done right.

When you watch Coyote vs. Acme, you are never struck by individual poor decisions. At any given moment, the next scene follows reasonably from the one before.

But the whole thing just feels flat and undifferentiated. "Flat" was my wife's choice of word, and she wasn't only talking about the 2D animation. (To be clear, it would not have been an improvement to make these characters CGI.) "Flat" as in unable to muster any sense of stakes, or intrigue, or emotional investment, or even interest. 

So when the suits at Warner Brothers were looking at Green's final cut, they must have thought the same. They must have seen the legs spinning in a dervish of potential energy, but the body itself not actually moving anywhere. 

Reason enough to seek a tax write-off if you ask me.

To be clear, I'm glad that did not happen. I still stand behind the fact that we should get to see every completed movie, even if it is an abomination. In fact, the greater abomination it might be, the more I want to see it. Coyote vs. Acme is not an abomination. It's just tedious. 

But then everyone seems to really like it. Holy crap, it's got a 96 on Rotten Tomatoes. 

How do I account for this? I expect there are two different things going on:

1) Many critics share my feeling of horror that a completed movie, one with such a delightful concept, could be completely "disappeared." They have to heap praise in order to show Warner Brothers just how wrong it was.

2) Nostalgia goes a long way.

But was Warner Brothers wrong? Maybe in their actual choice to seek the tax write-off. But not, in my estimation, in their judgment of the merits of the film.

I'd been struggling to start my review, but I better get on it because I have to post it one of the next three days. It comes out here on Thursday, and the idea with new reviews, especially when I've gotten a long lead time on watching them, is to post either the day before, the day of, or the day after the theaterical release.

This post has at least gotten my juices flowing about what I want to say. And there are, obviously, a lot of things I want to say.

I just wish I didn't have to say them. I wish I loved Coyote vs. Acme. But sometimes, the giant behemoth mega corporation trying to make a sketchy financial transaction is also right.