‘Coyote vs. Acme’
Directed by Dave Green (PG)
★★★
In Wile E. Coyote’s latest misadventure, the hapless would-be carnivore “won’t stop until he defeats [checks notes] Warner Bros.,” said William Bibbiani in The Wrap. In this “gut-bustingly hilarious” romp, Wile E. finally pauses in his Sisyphean pursuit of the Road Runner to try something new: He hires a lawyer to sue the Acme corporation over its defective mail-order products, and Acme turns out to be the parent company of the studio that owns every Looney Tunes character. The really crazy part? Warner Bros. once tried to shelve this movie to earn a tax write-off, only to be forced by a public outcry to sell it to a tiny distributor.
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Coyote vs. Acme mixes animation with live actors, said Jacob Oller in The A.V. Club, and it proves to be “slyly intelligent” about what winning means when an underdog takes on an impossibly powerful foe. Will Forte, “maybe the best he’s been since Nebraska,” plays Wile E.’s scruffy lawyer, a guy who’s spent a career chasing tiny payouts for cartoons who’ve been pancaked or blown up. The animation doesn’t match Forte’s level, but it contributes well enough to the movie’s “enjoyably explosive” slapstick humor. “Truth be told, the plotting isn’t quite up to the strength of the premise,” said Justin Chang in The New Yorker. But the “slight slackness” in the narrative allows for cameos by Tweety, Daffy, and other old friends. Most importantly, Coyote vs. Acme isn’t a cash grab. It’s “a fleet, funny throwback, made by artists with an obvious reverence for the original Looney Tunes universe.”
‘Buddy’
Directed by Casper Kelly (R)
★★★
“Buddy is everything you could want from a midnight movie,” said Christian Zilko in IndieWire. A mock horror tale that riffs on the chilling cheeriness of 1990s children’s TV shows like Barney, it features a giant, talking orange unicorn named Buddy who begins murdering the kids in his own series’ cast. In a separate world, a mom played by Cristin Milioti begins digging into buried Buddy history when she comes to suspect she once had a third child, and “the results are electric.” Unfortunately, after a “side-splittingly funny” opening 20 minutes, said Johnny Oleksinski in the New York Post, Buddy struggles to maintain momentum.
Director Casper Kelly made his name with Too Many Cooks, a 2014 parody of a sitcom’s opening credits sequence, and he’s brilliant here when sending up shows that kids once loved but “upon reflection were nightmarish hellscapes that are surely now paying for therapists’ vacation homes.” Because no real scares are built into the Milioti storyline, however, the movie becomes “rather one-note.” But both threads are studies in the effects of living in “profound denial,” said Sam Adams in Slate, and the cast helps sell the whole package. Keegan-Michael Key, who voices the unicorn, “never drops the aw-shucks lilt from his voice” even when Buddy’s at his most murderous. And while Buddy’s crimes are “brutal, even gory,” Kelly’s movie works because “he knows he doesn’t have to turn the dial too far” to make TV’s phony paradise feel menacing.
