The Bad Guys 2 is the sequel this summer needed

New Statesman​

23-07-2025

Photo by Universal Pictures
As a grudge-bearing puritan, I'd never liked the idea of a crime caper. The very words 'heist movie' stuck in the throat. Finding criminality funny and entertaining is plain wrong, surely?I may not have gone quite so far as Simone Weil. In her essay 'Morality and Literature', she claimed that in reality nothing is so beautiful and wonderful as the good, no desert so dreary, monotonous and boring as evil. Fictional good and evil are the other way around, she lamented. 'Fictional good is boring and flat, while fictional evil is varied and intriguing, attractive, profound, and full of charm.'
But I had lurking sympathy with Louis B Mayer who, on finding that he had accidentally produced the first great heist movie, John Huston's The Asphalt Jungle of 1950, reacted indignantly: 'It's trash. That Asphalt Pavement thing is full of nasty, ugly people doing nasty things. I wouldn't cross the street to see a picture like that.'
All of these qualms were swept away forever by The Bad Guys in 2022. This DreamWorks animation, the debut feature by French director Pierre Perifel, based on the children's book series by Aaron Blabey, is a joy – an enduring joy, I can confirm, having watched it on repeat with an eight-year-old.
Emulating Ocean's Eleven, with bits of Reservoir Dogs thrown in, Bad Guys presents a matchless criminal crew, led by the big bad wolf, Mr Wolf, a raffish pickpocket, brilliantly voiced by Sam Rockwell. As sidekicks, he has his best friend, the voracious, untrustworthy safe-cracker Mr Snake (Marc Maron); Mr Shark (Craig Robinson), an outsize master of disguise given to sudden panic; Ms Tarantula (Awkwafina), also known as Webs, a bad-tempered computer expert, who utilises all eight digits at lightning speed; and Mr Piranha (Anthony Ramos), the pint-sized, mango-faced muscle of the gang, a toxic farter at times of stress.
Arrayed against them are the foxy state governor, Diane Foxington (Zazie Beetz), concealing a criminal past of her own as the legendary Scarlet Paw, and infuriating do-gooder, scientific genius and guinea pig Professor Marmalade (Richard Ayoade). Told by fawning reporter Tiffany Fluffit (Lilly Singh) that some have described his war-stopping, panda-saving goodness as second only to that of Mother Teresa, Marmalade coos: 'Oh, Tiffany, it's not a competition, and if it were, it would be more of a tie, but there's a flower of goodness inside all of us, just waiting to blossom.' Ayoade voices this sanctimonious rodent wonderfully well, his ultimate villainy never in doubt, thanks to his English accent.
The Bad Guys addresses the allure of being bad, as compared to the effort of being good, directly. Anthropomorphic animation might not seem like the typical medium for these moral questions, but the film makes them its central ploy to brilliant effect. Zingily scripted by Etan Cohen (not one of those Cohen brothers), it's animated by Perifel and his collaborators in an exhilaratingly cartoonish style, sometimes more 2-D than 3-D, more akin to anime and French graphic novels than the usual bland polish of DreamWorks.
So here now is The Bad Guys 2, an automatic must-see for all captured by the original. Although still a heist movie, this time the model is more James Bond and Mission: Impossible, with the action pumped up, louder and more frenetic. Mr Wolf, fresh out of prison, is finding being good difficult, his application to work at a bank he has previously robbed three times unsuccessful. Then a new gang appears, the Bad Girls, led by a nasty snow leopard, Kitty Kat (Danielle Brooks), backed up by a deceitful raven, Doom (Natasha Lyonne) and a porky boar, Pigtail (Maria Bakalova). Threatening to expose Governor Foxington's past, they force the Bad Guys into one last job, a plot to steal all the gold in the world, using a giant magnet made of the rare element 'Mcguffinite', from space.
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Being that difficult second crime caper, The Bad Guys 2 lacks the great charm of being able to reveal its characters for the first time. And although Marmalade returns, he's underplayed and not the same, having used his time in prison to bulk himself up enormously. The scene in which Governor Foxington interviews him in his cell is yet another Hannibal Lecter pastiche, but no match for the Shaun the Sheep version.
No matter. In a summer of dodgy sequels (Freakier Friday and a fourth Naked Gun, to join the dinos and superheroes), it's good to see the Bad Guys, being good and bad. A heist is never about the loot, remember.
'The Bad Guys 2' is in cinemas now
[See also: Superman's new mission: to make the world 'a bit nicer']
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