We’re guessing that there’s a spreadsheet somewhere on an old company laptop in Hollywood whose rows and columns made the compelling financial case for the sequel to 2022’s mid-tier animated feature, The Bad Guys. As, on a purely vibes-based deduction, it’s not a film that too many people were either hankering for or expecting. Indeed, a review embargo for the film set for the day of release is, in the majority of cases, a red flag accompanied by a small, panicked firework display. So the odds were not in our favour.
The surprising news, then, is that Pierre Perifel’s film – like The Godfather, Toy Story and the first Bourne sequel – joins that rarified club of film franchises where the second film is arguably superior to the first. With The Godfather and Toy Story it’s a coin toss, but in this case, The Bad Guys 2 wipes the floor with the original which, in hindsight, looks like a scrappy work in progress.
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Mr Wolf (Sam Rockwell) is the immaculately-attired, smart-alecky leader of an inter-species wrecking crew whose skills perfectly align to make them maestros of the heist(ros). They are the archetypal, self-styled baddies, forced in the first film to go good, but now finding the job market and domestic drudgery of the strait-arrow life to be frustrating and dull.
All of the gang – Mr Snake (Marc Maron), Mr Shark (Craig Robinson), Mr Piranha (Anthony Ramos) and Ms Tarantula (Awkwafina) – are hankering for a cheeky bit of recidivism, when their transgressive prayers are answered as they learn of a master thief who is taking down joints and nabbing everything they can find made from the rare metal, McGuffinite. The cops are baffled, and so Mr Wolf lends his insider insight to spin the dictum, “It takes a thief to catch a thief.”
It’s a confident and spry film that actually manages to get better and better as it goes along. Perifel channels the limb-stretching physics and Picasso-esque landscape aesthetics of vintage-era Loony Tunes, while Rockwell’s voicework equals the louche, quippy charms of George Clooney in full Danny Ocean mode.
It’s a story about criminals who have reached a point where they do things purely for the thrill of it, desiring excess for no reason other than to have achieved a feat of thievery that exceeds all others. Which speaks directly to our modern oligarch culture. There’s a bumbling idiot character based on Elon Musk who, at a wedding of gaudy, Bezos-esque lavishness, uses an AI to identify his richest guests. And there’s also something quite subversive in how it deals with the notion of modern Robin Hoods, and how their ideals about distribution of wealth still leaves them with excessive and perhaps unearned levels of power.
But this is, in the main, a rolicking good time at the pictures, and its interstellar finale mocks the OTT stunt work of the Mission: Impossible films as we see the Bad Guys leap on to a space rocket from a moving helicopter. Never thought we’d ever be saying this, but roll on The Bad Guys 3.