I loved ‘The Bad Guys.’ I thought the animation and design were arresting. The script was quick, clever, and funny. It featured some extremely strong voice acting performances – Sam Rockwell, Marc Maron, Awkwafina, Zazie Beetz, Craig Robinson, and Anthony Ramos – which added so much character of the overall film. It was refreshing, surprising, action-packed, and had an intricate caper plot that pulled off what it set out to do and more.
So I was excited to catch the sequel, simply called ‘The Bad Guys 2,” which is a refreshing change, considering how most franchises add subtitles to help identify one movie after the next. But to my disappointment, ‘The Bad Guys 2’ wasn’t able to match its predecessor, much less exceed the standard it had set forth.
The film begins with a prologue, a flashback where Piranha (Ramos) is on his first mission with the Bad Guys. It’s a simple enough caper, not too many moving parts, but obviously done to help refresh the audience’s memory of who they were before the events of the first film turned them into good guys. The whole sequence is loud, messy, and bombastic, and felt like it was directed to capture the attention of the audience, keep children’s focus on the chaos on the screen and keep others from reaching for their phones.
It’s messy because it lacks the style and flair that the first film displayed. It’s chaos for chaos’ sake. Just a funny sequence to remind us who the characters are and where they came from.
Then the title card appears, and the film now shows us The Bad Guys, who are now good, but unemployed. No matter how hard they try, they can’t seem to get a job because of their history as criminals. As an animated film, it does offer up an interesting storyline about redemption in the modern age. Can criminals be rehabilitated? Is it worth giving them a second chance? What sort of discrimination do they face because of their troubled past? These questions are briefly explored until the Bad Guys decide to use their skills to stop a new thief, the Phantom Bandit, who is making waves with a string of thefts. They hope to catch them, bring them over to the police, and prove to everyone they’ve changed.
But things go awry when the Phantom Bandit was ready for them and turned the tables to make it look like the Bad Guys was the Phantom Bandit all along and proved everyone’s biases against them right. Now, the Bad Guys have to go in hiding and and find a way to clear their names.
What follows is one big sequence after another as the Bad Guys get caught in the Phantom Bandit’s web. How does a thief outsmart another thief? And do they even want to, when the whole world is against them and won’t believe they’ve changed?
This could have played out wonderfully if director Pierre Perifel and screenwriters Yoni Brenner and Etan Cohen hadn’t gone overboard with the plot and kept the film personal and a character study, much like the first film. Instead, ‘The Bad Guys 2’ is overloaded with plot, with two more capers snuck in-between its huge finale piece in an environment that just feels so big that it feels so far removed from what made the original so endearing.
In fact, there are still a lot of really cute little moments that work. Outside bells and whistles of the movie’s overdrawn plot – it’s the little moments between Wolf (Rockwell) and Fox (Beetz), or some of the dialogue (which feels spontaneous and sounds improvised) by Shark (Robinson), Webs (Awkwafina) and Piranha – the characters are what really makes this concept work and when they are spending too much time with the bigness of the film, we don’t get to enjoy the stuff really worth enjoying in the premise, which is how the team works together to save the day.
My Rating:
The Bad Guys 2 is still showing in cinemas. Get showtimes here.
