THE BAD GUYS 2
2025
Directed by Pierre Perifel
Written by Yoni Brenner and Etan Cohen
Let us acknowledge that The Bad Guys 2 represents an improvement on its predecessor, not only in the march of time and technique over three years that finds the sequel improving upon The Bad Guys' already-impressive exercise in style (though, obviously, this will be the main thing), but as a story. To some degree, this was automatic: The Bad Guys is a movie about a gang of crooks going straight because of their leader having a come-to-Jesus-moment out of more-or-less nowhere—it is, fundamentally, a caper film about stripping a caper film of all its antisocial catharsis—and obviously that was very unlikely to work, especially in a dumb, edgeless children's cartoon, the first film leaving its characters in a position of heroism which deployed the mechanics of something emotionally satisfying, but sure did come off pretty lame, while the container for their story (something about a mad scientist gerbil) sure wasn't about to help matters. Now the second film gets to explore the aftermath of their rehabilitated precarity, and discover that it is, indeed, not entirely satisfying, which will come as no great surprise to the vast majority of viewers who have had to live their lives in this world, and the tension between whether these former bad guys will succumb to the temptation to return to what made them happy, but which arguably hurt people in some nebulous way, is such an objectively superior narrative engine that it kind of had to be a better movie. Meanwhile, most of everything else that sucked about The Bad Guys is still here, in full or, sometimes, greater force, and it's a better movie, not a good one.
First, we hearken back to better times, finding our eponymous antiheroes—Mr. Wolf (Sam Rockwell), Mr. Snake (Marc Maron), Mr. Shark (Craig Robinson), Mr. Piranha (Anthony Ramos), and then-new-hire Ms. Tarantula (Nora Lum)—undertaking a heist in Egypt, wherein Tarantula proves her worth as a l33t h4x0r or whatever and is in return initiated into the gang's ethos of super-crime, learning it's less about the loot than it is about the power, which is the sort of thing that is obviously true about the appeal of heist movies though it's significantly less appealing when you say it out loud. Nevertheless, we know these must've been the good times, at least in comparison to what we get when we savvily jump-cut from sunny Cairo to bleakly-overcast Los Angeles (let's allow a movie its subjective color style), from their triumphant getaway in a bitchin' musclecar to Wolf straining to parallel park in a subcompact. It's half a decade and one Bad Guys film later, and Wolf makes the rounds of a series of job interviews, all of which are destined to end in rejection due to his notorious past. Similar circumstances pertain to the rest of the gang, still together in the sense that they share the same lair/flophouse, though at least Snake has outside activities.
Indeed, it is for this reason that when a new string of super-heists sends ripples through the town, and Wolf gets it into his head that he can prove the Bad Guys' newfound goodness by catching this "Phantom Bandit," that the crew begins to suspect, with horror, that their quarry must be their often-absent friend. Turns out he was just dating "Susan" (Natasha Lyonne), a raven, though when the Morally Ambiguous Guys collide with them at the luchador exhibition that they've predicted will be the site of their adversary's next heist, what it really turns out to have been was them being manipulated into a frame-up by the Phantom Bandits, led by Kitty (Danielle Brooks), a snow leopard, and further comprised of Pigtail Petrova (Maria Bakalova), a boar, and the previously-mentioned corvid "Susan," who's actually named Doom and was always honeypotting poor Snake, though he doesn't seem to mind very much. With their already tenuous connection to society now ripped to shreds, Kitty leverages the gang a little more, holding over their heads video proof of the secret criminal history of their ally and Wolf's own could-be-intimate friend, Governor Diane Foxington (Zazie Beetz), and, already intrigued by Kitty's plan to steal a whole rocket ship, they have little choice but to accept her offer to join forces with her team, at least for the moment, even as their frenemy and new police commissioner Misty Luggins (Alex Borstein) implacably hunts them down, Diane pursues a parallel agenda with the help of the previous film's imprisoned villain Professor Marmalade (Richard Ayoade), and Kitty's megalomaniacal plan is unveiled to be bigger than Wolf and friends could have ever imagined.
It is probably not bigger than the audience has already imagined—there's quite a bit of set-up regarding the sci-fi technology Kitty's invented and which she's going to be employing once she's in low Earth orbit aboard the rocket she intends to steal—and as with the first film, there is the distinct feeling that the storypeople and/or screenwriters have never watched even one single actual caper film and are basing their pastiche/parody of the caper genre instead on what they've confused for caper films, which is to say science fiction-heavy spy films with caper elements like Goldfinger (hard to avoid that comparison here) or every Mission: Impossible. (To be fair, there's a wedding setpiece in the middle here that at least feels like an actual caper film has ever been described to them. But even if I hadn't been soured on The Bad Guys 2 already, I don't know how good the movie would've had to have been to have avoided being soured by its epilogue, a sequel hook that feels like an all-but-explicit confirmation that the entire three hour saga of these Bad Guys was essentially just its makers groping blindly towards the promised land of a fundamentally different genre and finally getting there.) Regarding those screenplay credits, Etan Cohen is joined by Yoni Brennen this time, which raises the possibility that everything I like a little more about this one's screenplay was Brennen's contribution and everything that's exactly the same is Cohen's*; and, even though I've already started complaining, let me cut myself off, because it's worth spending a little bit of time on what I did like more.
I've already mentioned that it just has such a vastly more accessible emotional story, and that's more-or-less objectively true: "they pulled me back in, I didn't really want to, though actually I did" is a plot that can be done within the classical boundaries of the caper flick, and there's sufficient basic functionality that I suppose it even more-or-less "works." Rockwell is one of the few other elements from the first film besides the story (but then, his performance kind of is "the story") that is an unambiguous improvement, finding the actor—about one hundred minutes later than he should have, but better late than never, I guess—finally nailing down his George Clooney impression. This is pretty much its own reward (a double-edged sword of one, obviously, when the entire performance is designed to constantly remind you of better movies), though it's also simply easier to build an engaging character on foundations that aren't constantly shaking and swaying all over the place, and I have no real bone to pick with Rockwell. Otherwise, the voice cast hasn't moved one bit from the first movie—once again, the only other performances I have any particularly warm feelings about are Maron's and Beetz's—but the movie itself has moved around them, so that the non-Rockwell value-adds are in it less and the new cast isn't really much of anything, and in Bakalova's case (the Bulgarian gets a very boring Slavic stereotype without even the panache "stereotype" suggests) is actively bad, as are the previously-bad returning VAs, and while Lyonne is hypothetically a good partner for gravelly old Maron, even without commenting on her rather low commitment to the part (for again Rockwell, Beetz, and Maron are alone in seeming like they give the first fuck), what this amounts to is two masses of throat polyps cooing at one other, and your mileage will vary on how enjoyable you find that.
But I was starting to say nice things, and basically the first half-ish chunk of the movie is okay, or at least there are pleasures in it; it is a lot funnier than The Bad Guys, thanks to advancing into areas of comedy at least slightly to the side of "isn't it goofy that we think they're cool (but they're still cool, right)?"—hell, maybe one of the reasons the story comes off superior is that the Bad Guys are no longer operating under the burden of acting cool in an objectively uncool movie—with a steady clip of reasonably decent verbal and visual gags, starting no later (and they may start sooner) than that smash-cut to the present-day and Wolf's perpetual disappointment with the straight life, and continuing with their inept, self-serving, and collateral damage-heavy go at becoming vigilantes—goodness, even the overt Silence of the Lambs reference that is the majority of Diane and Marmalade's participation in the plot has a good twist to it (it speaks nothing good of Zootopia 2 that The Bad Guys 2 would do the better version of this joke). All of this offers you something to hang onto, even if, inevitably, what we eventually come to is farting so hard in a spacesuit that you almost die from fart poisoning, while even in the midst of halfway-alright patter-writing the script's connection to itself can virtually disintegrate. (There are some bracingly disinterested-feeling placeholder lines in this cartoon, notably a threat to tear a snake "limb from limb" that seems to have gone unnoticed by everyone involved.)
And it does still have the legacy drag of being a sequel to The Bad Guys, and it's my general position to forgive a sequel for the sins of its predecessor, even foundational ones—I don't even know why that's my position—but whatever the case, besides "story," it's surely not fixing or even eliding those sins. One of those ("this is bad at being a caper film") I've already identified, and if it's slightly funnier at being an I-guess-just-intentionally-bad caper film (Shark's improbable "master of disguise" shtick is at least a little better-finessed into a joke-adjacent format), that's mainly a hard-to-define matter of better timing or staging, or maybe I was just in a better mood (though it feels like it's actually doubling down on the utter laziness of Tarantula's movie hacking, to the point that possibly the funniest joke in the last thirty minutes of the movie is actually about how lazy their tropey employment of her skillset has been; it thus has a pretty bitter aftertaste).
But the rest is here too, and The Bad Guys 2 continues its predecessor's achievement of making me sound like a crazy asshole when it compels me to declare that the sequel's word-building, like the original's world-building, remains a total crock of shit. It is, anyway, still completely indifferent to figuring out anything resembling a consistent set of rules for a planet that is 99.999% human beings but has a few talking animals, but it constitutionally can't ever commit to the Looney Tunes surreality that lets that approach work (maybe that works even less well when the "emotional story" itself is better!). In some minor ways, it's even intensifying it, doubling the number of animal characters who just have regular-ass human given names (and also Doom?) despite our principal five having animal mononyms, and, occasionally, this sequel is still dipping its damn toes into its predecessor's Zootopia-esque prejudice allegory, with neither one having a world anywhere close to solidly-constructed enough to support that, though it has, thankfully, dialed this aspect back. In other Zootopia comparisons, however, let's hand it to The Bad Guys 2, they aren't nearly as anxious about being perverts: while this manifests initially with what I'd imagine even a furry would have to consider grotesque horror, in the form that "making out" with a snake takes—credit when it's due, this is funny—if one has patience, one does eventually get one's wolf on vixen action (if we're counting the "more BDSM than most kid's movies have" sparring scene, you actually start getting it right away), and given that what this entails are two anthropomorphized canids, the female of which is a tad smaller than the male, so that I'd basically forgotten Diane is a fox at all, I wouldn't even call this gross, so please, enjoy with my blessing.
So all told, as a movie, it still sucks; big surprise. As an animated movie, I continue to weep stinging salt tears at such enormous potential being squandered by DreamWorks Animation on this series, because God knows, it looks so very, very good. I'm going to sound like I'm being equivocal, and hopefully I can clarify why I'm not: it looks even better than The Bad Guys, which was already a terrific-looking cartoon and a vanguard soldier in the revolution against Disney-Pixarian caricatured photorealism; and it looks a skosh less interesting than The Bad Guys, because to some degree it represents the normalization of that revolution. It is, anyway, more streamlined-feeling and substantially more amenable to being boxed-up with what DWA** is doing elsewhere (it is not entirely "of Puss In Boots: The Last Wish," and I'm happy that it's more-or-less dropped the Spider-Versed framerate manipulation, but it nonetheless surprised me to scan down the story art/animation crew list—a little idly, so I might've missed some—and not spot any names in common with Forgotten Island), and it is a very slight bummer that the extremely particularized mid-century-animation-in-3-D-CGI approach that The Bad Guys took, especially in its abstracted background design, which was supported in virtually no way by the actual content of The Bad Guys, has been buried by a similar-but-not-the-same approach, even if, you know, The Bad Guys 2 wouldn't have supported it any better than the first one did.
That covers "less interesting" and I'm absolutely second-guessing myself on that, so I guess I'll be equivocating after all. Whatever it is, it's more successful and has more forceful "wow" moments, though after a fashion every piece of character animation on the animal characters*** remains something of a "wow" moment, with that "more streamlined" effect working out pretty well for an even-better-rendered "improbably carefully-painted cel animation" texture to these 3-D models, sleek and smooth and perhaps more at home in this environment and malleable, in the way of 2-D animation, for some truly wacky cartoon spectacle. Early on we get such a thing at that wrestling match, which is some good clean flashing light-style indulgence in graphic color and movement, and becomes a much more computer-busting sequence during the crowded getaway, though if I sound like I really enjoyed this sequence—it is not, like, "actually funny" in any particular way—then that's just an accident of being pretty overawed by the tech that's gone into it. However, a little paradoxically, the best sequences come after the story's already tottered into full-on Bad Guys bullshit, and it's so aggravating that the film's triumphs in cartoon action storytelling are also so stone cold stupid and so utterly untethered to the base level of realism that "caper film mechanics," and possibly even "action-adventure cartoon mechanics" demand, that the story it's telling unavoidably gets in the way of delighting at the pure imagery of it. But not all the way in the way; for instance, the delicate lighting treatment on this 2-D humanoid wolf character with literal, ink-outlined yellow cartoon eyes, but now he's in a bridal veil, is a tiny bit sublime.
And our plot here eventually requires our heroes to break into a rocket as it's launching—as it's leaving the atmosphere—and it is truly splendid to behold, on a technical level, anyhow. The 2-D-in-3-D effects animation of the clouds of superheated steam attending the launch, a defiance of "particle effects simulation" that's still using all of the ray-tracing tricks of lighting simulation, was seemingly designed as a favor to me, personally; the rocket itself continues to make me wonder if this isn't more interesting than the first film after all, arguably even still plying the same technique that made the first film feel special as a work of animation except with different mid-century animation reference points, so that even though it isn't, and the atmospheric haze of the lighting calculations and the moving "camera" (and what a moving "camera" it is!) both make this very clear, that colossal rocket nevertheless feels like it's an impossibly well-done moving background painting from Disney's 1950s experiments in limited animation, which perhaps-not-so-coincidentally also tended to involve fanciful space travel, and now the characters can interact with this background. I could've lived without the direct homage to my favorite film of my lifetime, Gravity, being placed directly against the fart joke to end all fart jokes, of course. But that's what you get with a Bad Guys: sumptuous and tantalizingly-novel visuals and three slightly-above-par voice performances that will never, ever fully rise above the sheer contempt driving everything else.
Score: 5/10
*I'm sure I made the "hired when they confused him for the brother of Joel" joke, along with every other commentator, last time; the new wrinkle being that we now know it's entirely possible that Ethan Coen, on his own, would not have written an appreciably better neo-noir caper film, though we can probably rest assured he would've written a more "correct" one.
**And, needless to say, Sony Pictures Imageworks, to whom DWA, in this period of belt-tightening (which is more to say, "this period of parent company greed"), began outsourcing animation with this very film.
***Human characters, less so: Luggins feels like CalArts' revenge, even more beanmouthed than before.
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