That's not all, folks: "Coyote vs. ACME"

The live-action/animation hybrid Coyote vs. ACME was, infamously, the film Warner Bros. - a studio that has otherwise been taking far more chances than most - had consigned to a shelf for several years as a possible tax write-off. (Much of its onscreen action is dated to 2022, which tells you how long it's been sitting there.) Given some of the IP-linked tat foisted upon us in that time - WB's disastrous Space Jam sequel, a Chinese Tom and Jerry knockoff where cat and mouse were suddenly best friends - this shelving almost certainly had less to do with any quality-control reservations than with what this text was actually communicating. Adapted by May December's Samy Burch from Ian Frazier's satirical New Yorker item - which saw Wile E. Coyote seeking legal redress against the company whose products repeatedly failed him in his efforts to capture the Road Runner - Dave Green's film speaks with some degree of frazzled experience to something our executive class might well be nervy about: the public's mounting awareness that our corporations have knowingly peddled substandard product, have intimidated potential whistleblowers, and - when all else has failed - have spent huge amounts of money on rigging entire systems. While still a PG-rated family entertainment - Bugs Bunny, cameoing as the film's Deep Throat, remains in traditional masculine dress - it's also the kind of sly creative subversion that, in a slower news cycle, would have Fox News anchors bloviating about Marxist indoctrination of our young. The pitch, you begin to suspect, may have been The Insider redrawn in the style of Who Framed Roger Rabbit, two titles released by a major studio (Disney, no less) at a time when the industry was much more confident in what it was selling, and thus able to shoulder internal criticism more robustly.

That corporate confidence is about all that's missing here. Coyote vs. ACME looks several zeroes cheaper than it would have done thirty or forty years ago, but then the idea was apparently to loose the Looney Tunes universe on the workaday Albuquerque of Better Call Saul, operating in this instance without the benefits of a Netflix budget. (You have to wonder just how much tax the suits were hoping to have written off.) Crucially, however, this is a movie made by folks who understand these old cartoons: their irreverent, rake-scattering, anvil-dropping form, the personalities of their key personnel (Bugs, Daffy, Porky, Tweety, Foghorn Leghorn: all present and correct) and the philosophies they represent. Burch and Green recognise that there is something heroic in the Coyote's persistence, and that his life's work amounts to a perverse act of optimism on a par with standing up to any all-powerful corporation. The human element here is very capably held together by Will Forte, one of our most flexible comic actors, whose washed-up (if evocatively named) claims lawyer Avery - one suit, motel lodgings, a tendency to show up for work at three in the afternoon - comes to find renewed purpose in pursuing the Coyote's case, some persistence of his own. Bob Hoskins set down the template and the markers for this variety of screensharing, but this may actually have been the tougher assignment for a flesh-and-blood co-star, because the Coyote communicates only with (a limited range of) handwritten signs, raised eyebrows and baleful looks to camera. Despite a couple of setpieces worthy of its 'toon predecessors, Green's film is neither as flashy nor starry as 2003's Joe Dante-engineered Looney Tunes: Back in Action (from a moment when WB still had residual faith in this brand), nor as chancy as what the Animaniacs were getting away with within the anarchist confines of Saturday morning kids' television. Yet it's visibly the work of creatives having immense fun and trying new things with IP, and its final moments represent a show of solidarity that is oddly heartening, moving even. That the suits ran scared of it - meep meep - may be all the commendation you need.

Coyote vs. ACME is now playing in cinemas nationwide.