The Bad Guys are now good guys in a sequel that's more endearing than funny, until it moves to outer space and becomes a rewarding watch.
“Bad Guys 2” is a benignly boisterous cartoon about a quintet of creatures—the dapper Mr. Wolf (Sam Rockwell), the goofy, tough-guy Mr. Snake (Marc Maron), the flatulent Mr. Piranha (Anthony Ramos), the disguise-savvy Mr. Shark (Craig Robinson), and the brainy Ms. Tarantula (Awkwafina)—who are famously bad guys (known as “the Bad Guys”), but deep down, they're pretty good. They're like any movie team with a quirky twist, from the brigade in “Guardians of the Galaxy” to the escaped zoo animals in “Madagascar.” They're villains, just like Gru, from the “Despicable Me” movies, is a “bad guy”: a known troublemaker who's really just trying, in his own way, to do good.
Directors: Pierre Perifel, JP Sans
Writers: Yoni Brenner, Etan Cohen, Aaron Blabey
Stars: Sam Rockwell, Marc Maron, Craig Robinson
In the three years since the first "Bad Guys" (a huge animated hit during the pandemic), our team of scoundrel anti-heroes has gone to prison and been rehabilitated, and are now officially good, which can make the first half of the film seem overwhelmingly sweet and harmless. Sam Rockwell, who voices the loquacious, white-clad Mr. Wolf, injects his eccentric saintly persona into the character, so that despite Wolf's yellow eyes and flashing teeth (he's supposedly a Big Bad Wolf), what you hear in every line is how friendly and relatable he is. Is this guy a criminal kingpin? Only in an adventure aimed at the younger audience of the animated demo.
However, if you go with that vibe of playful innocence, "Bad Guys 2" exerts a wholesome, slightly mischievous appeal. The film does have a real villain, and the majestic bite of her evil is felt: she's a thief known as the Phantom Bandit, soon unmasked as Kitty Kat (Danielle Brooks), a snow leopard who leads a trio known as the Mean Girls (among them Maria Bakalova as Pigtail Petrova, a wild boar with a nose ring and an incredibly literal Russian sense of things). They hijack the Moon X rocket and take it into space, setting in motion a master heist plot based on activating the world's most powerful magnet.
It's not until halfway through the film that the rocket takes off, at which point our heroes attempt to board it by flying alongside it… in a helicopter. They hop aboard the speedy rocket, even as it's blasting off from the stage. I confess that this sequence shocked me, because until then I thought "The Bad Guys 2" was gentle and endearingly comical, and little else, and suddenly we see animated characters acting as if they were in the middle of their own Tom Cruise-style action scene.
It's all part of the elegant and logistically rigorous world created by the film's French director, Pierre Perifel (co-directing this time with JP Sans, head of character animation on the first "Bad Guys"), who based these films on the young adult graphic novel series by Australian author Aaron Blabey. "The Bad Guys 2" becomes a space action movie, and that's where it really comes alive. Not that there aren't some personality quirks and laughs along the way.
Marc Maron once again lends his voice to the devious Mr. Snake, who has tried to reinvent himself as a yoga and kombucha fanatic; now he exits every situation with a Californian "Goodbye," which made me smile every time. In that space sequence, Mr. Pirahna's farts spiral out of control, fueling the possibility of an anti-gravity death Stanley Kubrick never dreamed of. And throughout the film, Mr. Wolf's connection with Diane (Zazie Beetz), a red fox who happens to be the state governor (and, unbeknownst to everyone, a former criminal), leads to a rare animated romance with real chemistry.
As a children's comedy, "Bad Guys 2" is more endearing than funny. But it's part of a trend in animation that, in my opinion, is just starting to take off. The most remarkable aspect of "The Smurfs" is that it takes place in a multiverse and addresses some of the clichés of superhero movies. And in just one sequel, the main characters of "Bad Guys 2" have transformed from childish thugs into a team of saviors protecting the planet.
The climactic sequence has James Bond and comic book DNA, as our heroes whirl through space and Kitty Kat's ultramagnet attracts all the golden objects on Earth. It's a visually brilliant tactic, placing the "Bad Guys" franchise on a grand new plane of spectacle. In the end, the film hasn't just set up another classic "they're coming back" sequel. It's reconfigured the identities of our heroes, entangling even such childish characters in the machinery.
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