When there are people to root against, Coyotes is a blast. Once it turns into a redemption quest for a Hollywood Hills dad, it drags.
Wildfires are pushing desperate coyotes into human populated neighborhoods. Without an ounce of self-preservation, the affluent residents are easy prey. The predators become more menacing when the electricity goes down in one neighborhood. Will a once humble, perfect family be able to get back to their hard scrabble roots or are they too spoiled to survive? Coyotes wants you to think they should, but it’s quite the stretch.
Director Colin Minihan gives his characters a pulpy introduction in honor of workaholic dad Scott (Justin Long), a comic book artist finishing his most recent book. This is much to the consternation of his wife Liv (Kate Bosworth, Long’s real life wife), who is alone in keeping the family together. Their teen daughter, Chloe (Mila Harris), is adopting the neighborhood’s attitude of entitled cluelessness, but she still enjoys family movie night. Scott is a mess and this family is not great at simple tasks like closing the garage or keeping their little dog indoors. Even after it’s established that coyotes are afoot, they spend a long time wondering what’s going bump in the night. In a fair world, they would all die, but they’re comparatively normal compared to their ridiculous neighbors, so half the fun of Coyotes is ridiculing everyone in the movie and grading them on a curve.
A freaky neighborhood.
Photo Credit: Aura Entertainment
There’s coked-up Trip (Norbert Leo Butz) and his employee Julie (Brittany Allen), a sex worker who is bad with details (like where her repeat client lives). Trip forgets that Liv is not one of his girlfriends for hire and can barely approximate normal behavior. The couple’s interaction with the family makes for tongue-in-cheek comedy as the family strives to be polite and not acknowledge the commercial nature of their relationship. Then there’s Gigi, a little dog, and her human Kat (Katherine McNamara), who dresses like someone’s idea of Reese Witherspoon in Legally Blonde if she was more vapid. The best part of Coyotes is that these ultra wealthy people who have everyone beat in terms of the rat race are completely defenseless on an even playing field. Most of Coyotes feels like a failed revenge movie about the environment versus the people ruining their habitat.
Of course, it makes Liv’s mission to get her family back on track more urgent. If they don’t remember that relationships, not money and materialism, are what matter, they will wind up coyote kibble. If you know coyotes, it will be harder to ignore that the onscreen animals behave more like media images of wolves and vary in size depending on the scene. They also keep creeping into scenes no matter how many of them get killed off during the movie. Let’s sign a waiver on realism because whether they’re practical animatronic effects or CGI, seeing them chew the scenery and their costars is glorious and brutal.
Keeping up with the pack.
Photo Credit: Aura Entertainment
If Coyotes has a problem, it’s pacing. These efficient killers are suddenly less deadly as they approach the denouement. Having the expendable characters stick around longer would help viewers stay invested after the sixty-seven-minute mark. Long takes center stage in an anti-climactic ending and solution that feels like a punk out after some vicious, unremitting kills. The horror favorite works best when he’s playing off other people with either of them looking at him like he’s pathetic or him looking at them like they’re dumb. Horror king or not, the cheese cannot stand alone. Happily, he has great chemistry with Bosworth, who treats the role like a mama bear and plays the most normal character in the bunch.
The script from Tad Daggerhart (The Expendables 4), Daniel Meersand and Nick Simon (The Pyramid), starts with lightning in a bottle that soon fizzles out. It’s so hard to be hilarious and elicit actual laughter from audiences, but somewhere along the line the writers decided “enough of that” and gave into disaster movie tropes. They refuse to kill their darlings and too quickly dispatch certain characters. It’s strange that they didn’t know what to do with pest exterminator Devon (Keir O’Donnell) who, like the coyotes, seems to have contempt for the hands that feed him and do not belong in that world. With a couple of revisions, Coyotes could’ve been a tight, sardonic movie devoted to ridiculing their community. Sadly when the hits get closer to home, the movie doesn’t have the stomach to keep going. Eat the rich is only literal if they don’t like the rich.
Other than the coyotes, Minihan and cinematographer Bradley Stuckel make the movie look better than it has any right to be. There are some delicious primary color scenes with a blue pool room with a red door. It’s one of many other moments delineating the line between safety and civilization and danger and death using red enveloping blues. From Blood Simple to 28 Days Later, red taillights never get old to signal a threat coming from behind. The use of split screens and wipes expanding one panel works to show characters’ reaction and what the coyotes were doing.
The bottom line.
Coyotes has fun skewering the people it sees as removed from reality, but finds it more challenging trying to make them relatable. The filmmakers cannot accept the definition of rich when it hits closer to home. Maybe they needed to add a creative to the team who still has student loans, is recycling cans and bottles for the deposit, selling blood, has roommates and was still eating beans and rice out of necessity (not taste), to stick the landing.
Coyotes is now available to rent at home. Watch the trailer here.
Images courtesy of Aura Entertainment. Read more articles by Sarah G. Vincent here.
REVIEW RATING
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Coyotes - 6/10
6/10
Originally from NYC, freelance writer Sarah G. Vincent arrived in Cambridge in 1993 and was introduced to the world of repertory cinema while working at the Harvard Film Archives. Her work has appeared in Cambridge Day, newspapers, law journals, review websites and her blog, sarahgvincentviews.com.
