The Pitch
It's the Wile E. Coyote lawsuit gag from the 1990 New Yorker piece, blown out to a live-action-plus-animation feature. Will Forte plays Kevin Avery, a small-time personal injury lawyer whose latest walk-in client happens to be a mute cartoon coyote with a filing cabinet's worth of exploded Acme merchandise and a grudge. John Cena is Acme's chief counsel, a corporate goon who used to be Avery's mentor. Dave Green directs. The first act sets up the case, the mismatch, and the fact that the Road Runner is never going to testify.
What It Gets Right
The mechanical stuff works. Green and his animation team nail the physics of a cartoon coyote sharing a real courtroom with a real dumb-guy lawyer, and the sight gags land because they're timed like actual Chuck Jones bits instead of Marvel weightlessness. Forte is doing the thing he's good at, which is playing a man whose dignity is one bad morning away from evaporating, and the dynamic between him and a silent co-star who communicates via cue cards has a genuine Buster Keaton streak to it. Cena, cast against his usual sunny-oaf mode as the smug antagonist, is having a great time. The script gets real mileage out of treating Acme as an actual American corporation with lobbyists, a legal department, and a very familiar founder.
The Case Against
Forte's register doesn't shift much. He arrives frazzled and stays frazzled, and if you're not already sold on the bit, the performance can feel like one long exasperated exhale. The pacing sags in the middle stretch when the movie has to remember it's also a legal procedural, and some of the human courtroom material is thinner than the animation around it. It's a family film with a PG rating, so the anarchic Looney Tunes cruelty gets sanded down in a few places you can feel. Variety's line about missing "the fizz of anarchy" isn't wrong.
Who'll Love It, Who'll Bail
If you liked Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Paddington 2, or the Lego Movie's willingness to actually build jokes, you'll be happy here. Parents who grew up on Saturday morning Warner Bros. cartoons will get the most out of the deep-cut cameos. People who want the mean, indifferent-universe Coyote of the shorts, where every anvil is a small tragedy, will feel the softening. Anyone allergic to Forte's specific shrieking-guy comedy has an easy exit in the first twenty minutes.
The Verdict
WORTH IT because the craft holds. The animation is expensive-looking in the ways that matter, Green stages his gags with real spatial logic, and there's a lived-in weirdness to letting a silent cartoon and a sweaty lawyer carry a whole movie. It doesn't sermonize. The Acme-as-evil-corporation stuff is played as farce, not as a lecture, and the movie trusts the joke to make the point instead of pausing so a character can spell it out. It's not a great film. It's a good one that Warner Bros. tried to erase for a tax break, and the tribunal is not going to punish it for surviving.
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