Review: Coyotes (2025)

I remember when I first saw the trailer for this and how excited I was to watch it.  Then it seemed to never come out.  Turns out it did a very limited release before going to streaming where, when I attempted to watch it last year, they wanted to charge a frankly obscene amount for a rental.  Thankfully, it was at a more reasonable price this year and I can finally cross it off the list of movies that grabbed my interest that I needed to watch.

Coyotes follows comic book artist Scott (Justin Long), his wife Liv (Kate Bosworth, giving us real-life married couple playing this fictional one), and their daughter Chloe (Mila Harris, not related to her fictional parents) as a natural disaster near their Hollywood Hills home leaves them trapped, without power and menaced by a large pack of coyotes.

Now, this premise is absolutely ridiculous, and the movie thankfully knows this, so it takes the horror-comedy approach with a heavy lean in the comedy direction.  It mostly succeeds in this goal, though the seams show a little bit in both the humor and the special effects departments.

This movie screams of multiple rewrites with vastly different approaches to the humor.  There's a weird misogynistic streak to some of the humor, forcibly softened by making Liv and Chloe among the more competent characters, and some topical humor that falls flat (a character blames the coyotes attacking on chemtrails).  If those had been more fully excised, the movie would have been much better overall, because much of the remaining humor works well and is gamely delivered by the cast.

The movie does improve once it moves to the more action-y part of the film, even if it does have several moments that stretch the suspension of disbelief.  Nothing too unforgiveable, thankfully, but will make a perceptive viewer role their eyes a bit.

The special effects for the coyotes range from acceptable to bad, with some of the coyotes not even glancing at realistic, and others making the audience think more of a wolf.  The other effects - primarily the gore and makeup of various attacks - is much stronger, and while I understand why CGI had to be use for the coyotes, I wish they could have gone in a more practical direction.

The acting is generally good across the board, with Bosworth giving the best performance.  It was nice to see Long play a well-meaning if slightly incompetent character after playing a series of more sleazy ones.  Also, is Long considered a scream king at this point?  If not, I think he should be.  Brittany Allen, as Julie, also has some great bits.

Overall, this wasn't a bad time.  It certainly isn't the best movie I've watched this month, but it is also far from the worst.  I think I would recommend it to a few people, if only for its blessedly-short 92 minute runtime.

6.5 out of 10