Waking up on Saturday mornings to the plethora of cartoons emitted from the then-small television screen was something almost every young child looked forward to. Of all the shows, The Road Runner Show was a favourite because it was subversive (long before you knew what that word meant) and ultra-violent. You knew the poor coyote would never actually catch his prey, but you revelled in his failures, that and all the gadgets.
Those wild gadgets would alway carry the Acme label, and the brand suffered from extreme quality-control issues. They never worked as advertised, and those products inform the story here. The film starts with a bit of industrial maleficence and then jumps to some Road Runner versus Coyote action. It looks magnificent on the big screen and sets the visual tone for what follows.
The mix of live action and cartoon characters has been done before (think Who Framed Roger Rabbit) but never in quite this fashion. Even the real actors chosen for the main roles (Will Forte and John Cena) have more than a bit of cartoon ethos in them. Forte as the lawyer who takes on the case against the big conglomerate Acme on behalf of Wile E. Coyote hits the right marks to give the fight a proper David and Goliath feel.
Drawing a parallel with the overabundance of power modern corporations now wield, the court scenes are especially topical. The satisfaction of the little guy coming out ahead is especially apparent when Wile E. captures the baddies with a great Rube Goldberg contraption. This film is surprisingly accessible for audiences of all ages and, looking for context in relation to events of today, has an underlying sense of subversion. Now the only thing missing is a breakfast bowl of rainbow coloured sugar.
Rob Hudson
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