
The Bad Guys 2: Putting the guff in McGuffins
Director
:
Pierre Perifel
Cert
:
G
Starring
:
Sam Rockwell, Marc Maron, Craig Robinson, Anthony Ramos, Awkwafina, Danielle Brooks, Natasha Lyonne
Running Time
:
1 hr 44 mins
There should be a word in
German
for that thing where a
movie
makes a joke ridiculing some offence the film itself is currently committing. 'We know! So don't nag us. Okay?'
There has rarely been a more egregious example than that found at the centre of this tolerable sequel to a modestly successful
2022 animation
. The titular troupe of anthropomorphic grifters realise that a set of recent robberies hinge on desire for a magical substance called McGuffinite. If you didn't get that, the material is named for the device in a
Hitchcock
film that serves merely as an accelerant for the plot. The mysterious wine bottle in Notorious. That sort of thing.
The Bad Guys 2, though big on zany visuals of the Hanna Barbera school, is dragged down by an overcomplicated plot about which it becomes increasingly hard to give a hoot. Mr Wolf, Mr Snake, Mr Shark and the rest, after saving the world in the first film, have now settled down to the boring straight existence. The former crooks are, to paraphrase the last lines of Goodfellas, learning to live the rest of their lives like a schnook. Crummy jobs. Cheap cars. No action.
[
The Bad Guys: Bad, but not in a good way
Opens in new window
]
Life heats up when a party of female animals, led by a snow leopard named Kitty Kat, carry out a series of robberies that are blamed on our Bad Guys. Cross and double cross eventually send everyone into space for what wants to be a spectacular denouement. Who is friend? Who is foe? Who really cares?
None of which is to suggest there isn't uncomplicated fun to be had here. Pierre Perifel, the French director of both films, seems to have enjoyed his Saturday-morning cartoons as a child. The clamorous, body-twisting set pieces sit somewhere between the ballet of Looney Tunes and the less sophisticated visual blare of Scooby Doo.
Nothing wrong with any of that. But one remains puzzled as to what these films want to be. Not nearly enough is done with the animal natures of the heroes. Mr Wolf, voiced by Sam Rockwell, may have big teeth (Grandma), but, the odd growl aside, he does little that George Clooney didn't to in the Oceans films. In contrast, far too much is done with that increasingly unwieldy plot. If you keep yakking about the McGuffin the audience will worry if they should genuinely care about it. That isn't happening here.
In cinemas from July 25th
Hashtags

Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles


Irish Times
4 hours ago
- Irish Times
Dear Erin: Why do Irish people love to get annoyed about ‘Oirish' films?
The most popular defence when you have failed to recognise, say, a broad pastiche of Donald Trump on social media is that the reality is now so extreme no parody is possible. Almost exactly 20 years ago, one Nathan Poe made such an argument about people who deny evolution. 'Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humour, it is utterly impossible to parody a creationist in such a way that someone won't mistake for the genuine article,' he wrote. This is known as Poe's Law. Anyway, all this is by way of explaining how I – along with others who should know better – briefly fell for a recent jape that didn't quite include a 'winking smiley'. A few weeks ago, ads began appearing on buses for an upcoming feature called Dear Erin. 'She was the Irish goodbye he never forgot,' the tagline read. Peter Coonan , in cloth cap and collarless shirt, writes a letter at a table that also holds a pint of stout and a glass of whiskey. One hand is bloodied. Shamrock spills from a breast pocket. Somehow a rainbow makes it into the collage. A moment's digging unearthed a trailer for the ghastly thing. 'My greatest love? A simple Irish boy from a simple Irish town,' a female American voice trills over glissando strings. Maybe he has now forgotten her? Of course not. Coonan, sitting in his booze-stacked snug, begins a letter with 'Dear Erin' before continuing: 'I've played that night over more times than the Finnegans fought the O'Malleys.' After a bit more shameless blarney, a shadow falls over our hero and we hear, in that same American accent, an uncertain 'Paddy?' READ MORE You might reasonably conclude that only a fierce eejit – no cuter than a donkey's behind – would fall for such a load of aul' cow's muck. But context is all. What was the advertisement doing on the side of a bus? What would Peter Coonan, a Love/Hate alumnus of some distinction, be doing in something that didn't quite exist? This wasn't a post on XformerlyTwitter. There was real money behind it. Moreover, this is surely a case where Poe's Law applies. The deluge of Micksploitation never stops: Far and Away, PS I Love You, Leap Year, Laws of Attraction, Wild Mountain Thyme. No stereotype is too insulting for visiting Americans to exploit. So, for an hour or two, I, and a few other film boffins on the social, could be forgiven (give us a break) for falling into the trap. The parody was a fair one. The clues were right there. What trailer for an apparently imminent title – 'coming this summer' – fails to include a precise release date? Squint and you will see that Paddy's letter is addressed to 'ERIN, AMERICA' – too broad for even the dimmest begorrah aesthetic. I cannot claim to be the first to spot that 'Hugh Forbes', the film's alleged director, shares his name with the character played by Maureen O'Hara's brother in The Quiet Man. We soon all decided that it was a stealth advertisement for something or other. Would Erin soups do such a thing? Not on this occasion. It transpired that the campaign was financed by Epic The Irish Emigration Museum . A longer video, released later, has Coonan break character and snort: 'I'm sorry but who f**king writes this s**t? How are we letting people away with this?' The museum's website , going in big, offers essays on 'the impact of Hollywood stereotypes of Ireland' and 'how to de-stereotype … 'Oirish' films'. This follows (another clue) a campaign from the same organisation that, with predictably hideous results, asked AI to create images of a typical Irishman. Fair enough. The strategy worked. At least one column in at least one national newspaper has now mentioned the prank. The worthwhile question is less why Americans (sometimes still the British) keep doing this – lazy sentimentality? – than why the nation remains so eager to get annoyed about it. It is a little over a year since we all went ballistic over a harmless Netflix title called Irish Wish . Yes, as I then wrote in this place , the Lindsay Lohan vehicle was silly. But was there any need to publish all those 12,000-word treatises on its supposed crimes against the national psyche? [ Planning to hate-watch Lindsay Lohan's Irish Wish? Micksploitation addicts should prepare for disappointment Opens in new window ] There is no easier way of attracting Irish attention than releasing something that shamelessly ploughs the Micksploitation groove. The Epic campaign is correct to bemoan the more egregious tropes. But let us not pretend we wouldn't miss these things if they went away. Baloney such as Wild Mountain Thyme and Irish Wish make us feel noticed. They make us feel righteous. They allow our hearts to beat a little faster. If Americans didn't do this to us we would have to do it to ourselves. As we have just done.


Irish Times
7 hours ago
- Irish Times
Dying review: Dark family saga shows living, like dying, is a messy business
Dying Director : Matthias Glasner Cert : 16 Genre : Drama Starring : Lars Eidinger, Corinna Harfouch, Lilith Stangenberg, Ronald Zehrfeld, Robert Gwisdek, Anna Bederke, Hans-Uwe Bauer, Saskia Rosendahl Running Time : 3 hrs 3 mins Matthias Glasner's Dying (or Sterben in the original German) is a film composed like its central musical motif: sprawling, discordant, haunted by mortality and strangely reminiscent of other works. Spanning three hours and five loosely tethered chapters, this dark family saga plays like a collage of recent festival favourites; early, unvarnished scenes of elder care nod towards Vortex and Amour ; a hectic middle section concerning a conductor recalls Todd Field's similarly themed Tár ; a late narrative swerve into assisted suicide intersects with Pedro Almodóvar's The Room Next Door . Somehow, the disparate pieces and maximalist clutter find a rhythm. Glasner's sweeping intergenerational study lays bare the fractures within a German family. Lissy (Corinna Harfouch), an incontinent matriarch dying of cancer; her husband Gerd (Hans-Uwe Bauer), vanishing into dementia; their son Tom (Lars Eidinger), an enigmatic conductor rehearsing a choral piece titled – get it? – Dying; and Ellen (Lilith Stangenberg), their estranged, self-loathing daughter, who works as a dental assistant in the belief that it's a job everybody hates. She sings beautifully, but only when drunk. Her desperate affair with a married colleague marks her out from a clan composed of emotionally distant adults. Tom's marked detachment is signalled by his bizarre domestic arrangements and the dispassionate abandonment of his depressed composer friend. His blank self-concern veers toward blackest comedy: imagine an episode of Peep Show directed by Michael Haneke. READ MORE There's plenty to admire in the performances – Harfouch, Eidinger, and Stangenberg all deliver searing, bravura turns. The film's obsession with finality makes room for bodily fluids of all varieties. Even the film's hook-up scene – Ellen pulling a lover's tooth before kissing his mouth – is bloody. Living, like dying, is a messy business. The script's wandering and overlapping arcs can feel uneven and tricksy, yet there's something utterly compelling in how Glasner stages decay not just as a biological inevitability, but a doomy familial legacy.


Irish Times
8 hours ago
- Irish Times
Kneecap banned by Hungary ahead of planned festival performance
Hungarian authorities have banned Irish rap group Kneecap from entering the country to perform at the Sziget Festival. They accused the band of using anti-Semitic hate speech and praising the Hamas militant group , a government spokesperson said on Thursday. Belfast-based Kneecap, who regularly display pro-Palestinian messages during their gigs, have caused controversy elsewhere in recent months, including at Britain's Glastonbury Festival, where frontman Liam Óg Ó hAnnaidh – known as Mo Chara – accused Israel of committing war crimes. 'Hungary's government has moved to ban Kneecap from entering the country and performing at Sziget ... citing antisemitic hate speech and open praise for Hamas and Hezbollah as justification,' government spokesperson Zoltan Kovacs wrote in a post on X. READ MORE Mr Kovacs later posted the official letters from immigration authorities banning the band for three years, claiming that their entry would 'seriously threaten national security'. In May, Mo Chara was charged with a terrorism offence in Britain for allegedly displaying a flag in support of Iran-backed Hizbullah. He denies the offence. Last week, UK police said the group would face no further action following their performance at Glastonbury last month. The trio led Glastonbury crowds in chants of 'f**k Keir Starmer ', in reference to the British prime minister, during their set at the festival. Representatives of Kneecap did not immediately reply to requests for comment. The band has said previously that its members do not support Hamas or Hizbullah, and that it condemns 'all attacks on civilians, always'. Hungary's government had already asked festival organisers to drop Kneecap from the line-up at the week-long event, which draws several hundred thousand music lovers to an island in the River Danube each year. More than 150 artists and cultural figures, including Academy Award-winning director Laszlo Nemes Jeles, have also signed a petition protesting against Kneecap's participation. Sziget organisers, who said they had not been notified of the government's decision, have resisted the calls to scrap Kneecap's planned performance on August 11th. 'Our festival remains true to what we have consistently achieved over the past 30 years: there is no place for hatred, incitement, prejudice, or any form of racism or anti-Semitism,' they said in a statement last week. Sziget's other performers this year include Post Malone, Shawn Mendes and Charli XCX. – Reuters