★★★★☆ The Bad Guys 2, directed by Pierre Perifel, JP Sans
Scattershot, but always funny
The Bad Guys 2
Directors: Pierre Perifel, JP Sans
Scattershot, but always funny
I love, love, love animation. What that means is that, while all you refined artistic types are watching the latest iteration of Mission Impossible or Fantastic Four and turning up your noses at the CGI, I am sitting there saying, “I want a whole movie’s worth of that.” There is nothing more fun than a well-done heist movie, and I enjoyed the first Bad Guys film, so seeing The Bad Guys 2 Saturday (9-Aug-2025) in the theater was an easy decision.
The Bad Guys are a team of supercriminals: The Big Bad Wolf (voiced by Sam Rockwell), Snake (Marc Maron), Shark (Craig Robinson), Piranha (Anthony Ramos), and their hacker Tarantula, nicknamed Webs, voiced by the incomparable Akwafina. Tarantula is both hilarious and utterly adorable. If Webs ever gets a starring role in a Dreamworks animated film, I want to see it.
In the first film The Bad Guys were caught and went to prison. They are now out of jail and are trying to be good guys. It’s not going well. The job interviews are tremendous fun. Meanwhile some criminal known as the Phantom Bandit is stealing random stuff, leaving The Bad Guys’ signature glitter bombs behind at each crime scene, in an obvious attempt to frame them. They figure out that all the items being stolen are made of MacGuffinite—I laughed out loud at that. And guess what the buckle of the belt awarded to the champion of the Lords of Lucha tournament is made of?
So we get an elaborate action-filled set piece at a wrestling arena. Here we meet the Phantom Bandit, who is actually three new criminals: Kitty Kat (a Jaguar, I think: Danielle Brooks), Doom (some kind of bird, Natasha Lyonne), and Pigtail Petrova (looks like a boar, but she’s a she, Maria Bakalova). There’s a wedding heist, and then an outer space adventure.
It’s all great. The animators frequently take advantage of the freedom from physical law animation offers. At one point I found myself objecting, “You know, a helicopter cannot actually catch a rocket.” But that somehow makes it even better!