Movie Review: 'The Bad Guys 2'

The Bad Guys 2, directed by Pierre Perifel, is the latest theatrical release from DreamWorks Animation, and is the sequel to 2022's The Bad Guys, which has gone on to become very popular with furries. The titular "Bad Guys" are a gang of "scary" animal ex-thieves featuring Mr. Wolf (voiced by Sam Rockwell), Mr. Snake (voiced by Marc Maron), Miss Tarantula a.k.a. "Webs" (voiced by Awkwafina), Mr. Shark (voiced by Craig Robinson) and Mr. Piranha (voiced by Anthony Ramos), plus Diane Foxington (voiced by Zazie Beetz), the current fox governor of the state of California and also secretly an ex-thief known as the "Crimson Paw", who, unlike the Bad Guys, was never caught. Having given up their lives of crime last movie, this movie begins with the Bad Guys living the trials and tribulations of ex-cons.

The movie is already available for digital purchase, despite the movie only being out a little over two weeks. However, DreamWorks Animation has been playing Moneyball recently, spending about half as much as most of the other major studios on their theatrical releases, so they've already made back most of their money domestically, and are in the black (more or less) counting international grosses. It's not a big hit, but it is a "base" hit, and that's what DreamWorks is aiming for. DreamWorks Animation has never gotten past the billion mark (Shrek 2, way back in 2004, was the closest), and the company seems to have accepted this fact. If anything, when they make a "big swing" anymore, it's an Oscar play rather than box office, like last year's The Wild Robot, which ultimately did not win (once again, Shrek is DreamWorks's only Best Animated Feature, despite being the second most nominated studio in the category).

But the point of bringing up this "inside baseball" bit about box office is that this has already been earmarked as a DreamWorks franchise. Ironically, they were bumped by The Wild Robot in the studio's logo sequence this year, but that seems to be more about DreamWorks wanting to avoid having them appear in front of their own movie than lack of confidence. I'm very confident there will be a The Bad Guys 3, and am looking forward to it, because both movies have been a lot of fun.

After a flashback opening to the Bad Guys' heyday as wanted international criminals, the movie opens with the team on a fruitless job search. The movie comes its closest to making a real world point here, as though the audience knows that the team has the best intentions, they are ex-cons. Confidential to the Bad Guys, but next time, try the food service industry. Anyway, the one exception to this is the usually cranky Mr. Snake, who seems to be living his best life. Oh, he hasn't found a job, either, but he has found a girlfriend, a crow named Susan (voiced by Natasha Lyonne). Mr. Wolf, however, seems to have no luck in this area either, as Diane is keeping their relationship "friendly" because of politics, or otherwise, yes, they'd be a couple. Well, I've been keeping track of the lack of cross-species romances in mainstream animated "furry" movies for so long now, I'm basically a whole different person, so it's nice to say the ball, for once, is not in GOAT's court, as it were.

A recent string of robberies by a "Phantom Bandit" inspires Mr. Wolf to help human police Commissioner Misty Luggins (voiced by Alex Borstein) solve them, until he figures out the robberies line up with Mr. Snake's date nights. He suspects Mr. Snake has gone bad, but the marketing for the movie doesn't seem to care that you know Susan is actually Doom, a member of the Bad Girls, a still active gang of animal thieves, and her dates with Snake have been setting the Bad Guys up to look like the culprits. (Mr. Snake doesn't mind, by the way. In fact, he finds treachery kind of hot, actually.)

Anyway, besides Doom the crow, the Bad Girls are Pigtail (voiced by Maria Bakalova) and gang leader Kitty (voiced by Danielle Brooks). They have a plan to steal, literally, all the gold in the world, and have been helped behind the scenes by evil guinea pig Professor Marmalade (voiced by Richard Ayoade), the villain from last movie, who wants revenge on the Bad Guys and Diane Foxington, hence why they're being set up to take the fall.

This is a lot of characters to keep track of, and I've complained in the past that team movies like this often seem to focus on one or two characters while the rest of the group just quips in the background. In the original movie, it was kind of the Wolf and Snake (with special guest appearances by Diane) show, for instance, while Piranha, Webs and Shark didn't seem to get to do as much. Mr. Wolf is still the protagonist, and Pigtail comes the closest to "reduced to quips from a celebrity voice" (though you can't complain too much when the celebrity voice quips are from Maria Bakalova), but I do feel that this does feel more like an actual team movie than I've seen in a while. Or at least, they all have fun stuff to do.

Kitty, as the leader of the Bad Girls and main antagonist, does seem to come down with a case of "makes good points, but then tries to kill everyone" villainy. She echoes Wolf's "everyone thinks I'm scary, so might as well be a criminal" ethos of the first movie, before his turn to good. And she does make a nice counterpoint to Diane, who never actually suffered any consequences for her thievery, and so never had to go through the "please give me a second chance" phase of turning good; of course, Kitty never tried to go good, so doesn't understand that Mr. Wolf didn't "break good" for acceptance, but for himself and his friends. He never actually points that out to her in the movie, and maybe he should have.

The original Bad Guys movie had its own unique visual style, and this movie carries that on. It's a very good looking movie, and furthermore, the style seems its own, not borrowed directly from any other recently popular movie. On one hand, the stylization rather than a fixation on realism probably does help with that budget we were talking about at the beginning of this review, but on the other, I did see the How To Train Your Dragon remake from earlier this year, and it illustrated why the 2010s pursuit of "realism" has been replaced by more stylish looks, because there's not much point to making realistic backgrounds with realistic lighting for your cartoon dragon if you can just put the cartoon dragon in an actual real setting.

World-wise, the universe makes about as much sense as it does last movie, and, if anything, has gotten a tad bit more self aware about its own ridiculousness. One odd stand-out, however, is the third act, which mostly takes place in outer space. Here, the weightlessness of space is presented fairly realistically; this is definitely a post-Gravity movie world we're living in.