John Cena is standing in the Albuquerque desert, squeezing a cartoon canary in his fist, and he’s speaking fluent baby talk without cracking a smile.
That’s the funniest scene in Coyote vs. ACME, and it exists because somebody got sick.
Warning: Minor spoilers ahead for Coyote vs. ACME.
The bird was never sweet
Tweety Bird looks like the cutest, sweetest member of the Looney Tunes bench, and decades of recent cartoons have leaned into that reading in ways that grate. His earliest shorts say otherwise.
Go back to Tweety’s first appearance. The little canary isn’t a victim being chased around by Sylvester the Cat. He enjoys the chase. He delights in tempting Sylvester, then sets him up for disaster.
“Tweety’s sadistic,” screenwriter Samy Burch said.
So the movie makes him a villain: a pint-sized enforcer for the ACME Corporation, working against the heroes. Some fans expecting a cute little bird may be thrown. The filmmakers never wavered.
“Even in the first pitch I did, this idea of him being a heavy felt funny,” Burch said.
“I don’t pay you to tink you taw”
Casting Tweety as muscle puts him on the payroll of ACME chief counsel Buddy Crane, played by Cena. Their scene together is the movie’s most unhinged stretch.
After Tweety fails to apprehend the Road Runner, Cena meets him out in the desert to deliver a personal threat. Tweety starts explaining how the Road Runner got away, opening with his signature “I tawt I taw.” Cena cuts him off in the bird’s own speech pattern. “You tawt you taw? I don’t pay you to tink you taw I pay you to taw!”
The rest of the conversation proceeds entirely in Tweety-speak.
Eric Bauza, who voices most of the film’s Looney Tunes characters, plays a terrified Tweety exactly right. But Cena is the one who makes it land, because he gets through the whole absurd exchange without grinning and without softening his menace by a degree.
A sick day rewrote the movie
The scene wasn’t in the plan.
“It’s funny, that scene came together as a total surprise,” said director Dave Green. “Maybe, like, one week into photography, Will [Forte] had gotten sick and we needed to quickly rearrange the schedule and change locations. I think a version of that scene originally took place in John’s office, or maybe at the steakhouse, with John and Tweety facing off against each other while John is eating a steak. But those different iterations had to go out the window and we had to do a story patch because of our schedule change. Everyone put their heads together and it resulted in one of my favorite scenes in the movie. We shot it against the same backdrop where, I’m sure, they’ve shot tons of standoffs in Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, in the middle of the Albuquerque desert.”
Of his star, Green said, “John nailed it right away, just absolutely deadpan. He gave us so many great versions of anger and temperature. It was a blast to shoot that scene. It’s completely absurd.”
Why this one actually understands the characters
What struck me most about Coyote vs. ACME, as someone who’s spent real time with these cartoons, is how well it knows the Warner Bros. roster. That sounds like the bare minimum. It’s been treated as optional before, which is why most previous theatrical Looney Tunes outings have been sub-par.
Take Daffy Duck. He isn’t only the bitter duck who’s jealous of Bugs Bunny. That version took hold in the late 1940s, especially in shorts directed by Chuck Jones. Daffy’s earlier appearances, the ones directed by Bob Clampett, had him living up to his name as a wild troublemaker nobody could contain.
Green and Burch reach for the Clampett Daffy, even though angry Daffy has been the dominant version for more than 70 years. Same instinct that produced the villain Tweety.
Cena has proven his comedic chops across a wide number of comedies, but watching him inhabit Tweety’s speech patterns while a cartoon bird gets squished in his meaty fist suggests the guy really can do anything. Give us the Tweety and Buddy Crane spin-off next.
Coyote vs. ACME releases in theaters on Aug. 28.
