{"id":22572,"date":"2025-07-25T10:53:08","date_gmt":"2025-07-25T10:53:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/22572\/"},"modified":"2025-07-25T10:53:08","modified_gmt":"2025-07-25T10:53:08","slug":"the-bad-guys-2-review-a-benignly-rambunctious-follow-up","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/22572\/","title":{"rendered":"‘The Bad Guys 2’ Review: A Benignly Rambunctious Follow-Up"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\t\u201cThe Bad Guys 2<\/a>\u201d is a benignly rambunctious cartoon about a quintet of critters \u2014 the debonair Mr. Wolf (Sam Rockwell), the goofy\/badass Mr. Snake (Marc Maron), the flatulent Mr. Piranha (Anthony Ramos), the disguise expert Mr. Shark (Craig Robinson), and the brainiac Ms. Tarantula (Awkwafina) \u2014 who are famous for being bad guys (they\u2019re known as \u201cthe Bad Guys\u201d), but when you come right down to it they\u2019re actually pretty good guys. They\u2019re like any movie team with a special freak quality, from the \u201cGuardians of the Galaxy\u201d brigade to the escaped zoo animals of \u201cMadagascar.\u201d They\u2019re bad guys the way that Gru, from the \u201cDespicable Me\u201d films, is a \u201cbad guy\u201d \u2014 a notorious troublemaker who\u2019s really just trying, on his own terms, to do right.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn the three years since the first \u201cBad Guys\u201d (a major animated hit during the pandemic), our team of rascal antiheroes have gone to prison and gone straight, and they\u2019re now officially good guys, which can make the first half of the movie seem overwhelmingly sweet and harmless. Sam Rockwell, who voices the fast-talking, white-suited Mr. Wolf, injects his flaky-saint personality right into the character, so that despite Wolf\u2019s yellow eyes and gleaming teeth (he\u2019s supposed to be a Big Bad Wolf), what you hear in every line is how friendly and relatable he is. This dude is a criminal ringleader? Only in an adventure aimed at the younger end of the spectrum of the animation demo.<\/p>\n

\n\tYet if you let yourself get on that wavelength of frisky innocence, \u201cThe Bad Guys 2\u201d exerts a wholesome and slightly mischievous appeal. The movie does have a real villain, and you feel the regal bite of her nastiness \u2014 she\u2019s a thief known as the Phantom Bandit, who is soon unmasked as Kitty Kat (Danielle Brooks), a snow leopard who leads a trio known as the Bad Girls (they include Maria Bakalova as Pigtail Petrova, a wild boar with a nose ring and a terrifically literal-minded Russian sense of things). They hijack the Moon X rocket ship and take it into space, launching a master plan of thievery built around triggering the world\u2019s most powerful magnet.<\/p>\n

\n\tIt\u2019s not until halfway through the movie that the rocket ship blasts off, at which point our heroes attempt to board the ship by flying next to it\u2026on a helicopter. They leap aboard the surface of the speeding rocket, even as it\u2019s casting off stages. I confess that this sequence stunned me, because up until then I thought \u201cThe Bad Guys 2\u201d was mild and cutely comic and not much more, and suddenly we\u2019re watching animated characters act as if they\u2019re in the middle of their own Tom Cruise stunt.<\/p>\n

\n\tIt\u2019s all part of the fancifully elegant and logistically exacting world created by the film\u2019s French director, Pierre Perifel (co-directing this time with JP Sans, head of character animation on the first \u201cBad Guys\u201d), who based these movies on the junior graphic-novel series by the Australian author Aaron Blabey. \u201cThe Bad Guys 2\u201d turns into an outer-space action movie, and that\u2019s where it really comes alive. Not that there aren\u2019t a few high quirks and personality chuckles along the way. Marc Maron, once again, voices the gravelly trickster Mr. Snake, who has tried to reinvent himself as a yoga-and-kombucha health fanatic; he now exits every situation with a California \u201cBye-eeeee,\u201d which made me grin each time. In that outer-space sequence, Mr. Pirahna\u2019s flatulence gets out of control, fueling prospects of an anti-gravity death Stanley Kubrick never dreamed of. And throughout the movie, Mr. Wolf\u2019s connection to Diane (Zazie Beetz), a red fox who happens to be the state governor (and, unbeknownst to everyone, a former criminal herself), results in the rare animated romance with some actual chemistry.<\/p>\n

\n\tAs a children\u2019s comedy, \u201cThe Bad Guys 2\u201d is more affectionate than ha-ha funny. But it ties into a trend in animation that I feel is just beginning to take off. The most notable aspect of \u201cSmurfs\u201d is that it unfolds in a multiverse and engages some of the tropes of superhero movies. And in just one sequel, the title characters of \u201cThe Bad Guys 2\u201d have gone from being kiddified ruffians to a team of saviors protecting the planet. The climactic sequence has James Bond\/comic-book DNA, as our heroes swirl around in space and Kitty Kat\u2019s ultra-magnet attracts all the gold objects from earth below. It\u2019s a visually super-cool gambit, and it sets the \u201cBad Guys\u201d franchise onto a grand new plane of spectacle. By the end, the movie hasn\u2019t just set up another sequel in the standard they\u2019re-coming-back way. It has reconfigured our heroes\u2019 identities, enmeshing even characters this child-friendly in the gears of adult entertainment. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cThe Bad Guys 2\u201d is a benignly rambunctious cartoon about a quintet of critters \u2014 the debonair Mr.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":22573,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[96,2839,13843,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-22572","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-entertainment","tag-movies","tag-the-bad-guys-2","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22572","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22572"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22572\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22573"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22572"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22572"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22572"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}