The Bad Guys, an animated heist comedy released back in 2022, finally offered parents a way to wean their kids onto Steven Soderbergh and his Ocean’s trilogy. What a gift! It looked snappy in that post-Spider-Verse “3D-made-to-look-like-2D-animation” way, featured Sam Rockwell as a besuited wolf doing a fairly nifty George Clooney impression, and had enough gags to keep the whole thing moving at a pleasant pace. And this sequel, greenlit off the back of a hefty haul of $250m at the box office, nearly sends us right back to that feeling.
The Bad Guys 2 has just enough wit and spirit that you can take your kids to see it without feeling like you’re doing a disservice to their intellectual development. It even, in fact, looks better than its predecessor, since directors Pierre Perifel and JP Sans’s animation team have pushed the physicality of their zoological crew of thieves-turned-heroes – Rockwell’s Mr Wolf, Mr Snake (Marc Maron), Mr Shark (Craig Robinson), Mr Piranha (Anthony Ramos), and Ms Tarantula (Awkwafina) – in a way that wisely and happily borrows from the jerky but imaginative realm of anime.
That said, the task of drumming up a plot about criminals who want to do right but who also look objectively cooler when they’re doing wrong ends up with the sequel, scripted by Christina Hodson, stuck chasing its own narrative tail. We start with a flashback to the crew in their prime, engaged in one of those stereotypical vehicle chases through a Middle Eastern city (at one point they have to swerve out of the way of a pile of crates filled with chickens). We then return to the present day and find them all luckless in the task of finding steady, respectable employment.
And while nobody’s expecting The Bad Guys 2 to sit the kids down and lecture them about the link between secure employment prospects and reduced reoffending rates, the film still strides past several open goals and circles back to its predecessor’s basic assertions that we shouldn’t judge wolves by their toothy covers. Neither does it help that Zootropolis, which offered the same lesson first, also has a sequel out this year.
Here, the Bad Guys find themselves framed by a rival crew – Kitty Kat (Danielle Brooks), Doom (Natasha Lyonne), and Pigtail Petrova (Maria Bakalova) – operating as “The Phantom Bandit”, swiping priceless artefacts made out of a rare metal known as “MacGuffinite” (and there are plenty more cine-literate jokes where that came from). Unless it’s meant as a covert homage to the all-female heist team in Steve McQueen’s Widows, there’s no real motivation behind these characters apart from the vague sense of apology for the OG Bad Guys falling into that tired, old “all men, one woman” formation.
There’s also an Elon-Musk type figure named Mr Moon (voiced by Colin Jost) with AI-enhanced glasses and a “Moon X” rocket. You spend the entire film waiting for some kind of slam dunk satire, only to realise he’s there exclusively so the rocket can launch and we can get a climactic punchline of a space suit filled with farts. Which, for both good and bad, sums up this film well enough.
Dir: Pierre Perifel, JP Sans. Starring: Sam Rockwell, Marc Maron, Craig Robinson, Anthony Ramos, Awkwafina, Danielle Brooks, Natasha Lyonne, Maria Bakalova, Zazie Beetz. Cert PG, 104 minutes.
‘The Bad Guys 2’ is in cinemas from 25 July
