I should start by saying that I am only a recent covert to the Bad Guys franchise. It was a little bit like the planet killer asteroid you know is going to show up in a few weeks, but you have other stuff you need to do before you can properly prepare for it, so you just sort of keep doing your own thing until the situation demands your attention more urgently. This was maybe the movie that I was going to take my niece to see when plans fell through for Fantastic Four, but it required that we all watch Bad Guys: the Original beforehand, so the morning of our proposed outing, we all plopped down on the couch to watch it for the first time. Friend’s reaction to the jokes in the first fifteen minutes was actually kind of priceless, like listening to him contextualize the plot and genre for his little monsters and grow increasingly perplexed by the premise (“This isn’t really a kids movie, is it? What is happening here?”) was more fun and endearing that the movie will ever be, because at its core, it is Ocean’s 11 with animals.
The first movie’s twist of the Bad Guys getting caught early in the first act and then having to reform and prove themselves in the second act is strong, in addition to the fact that there’s a fun misdirect and gender swapped criminal twist which seems to actually be the entire premise of BG2 in the trailer (that a group of lady criminals are attempting to pull the BG back into the game for their own twisted purposes). That’s not actually the meat and potatoes of the second movie, which assembles the whole gang, but yet again challenges the dynamics of trust and forgiveness by close friends and new loves.
The opening car chase is strong as far as animated car chases go. The luchador fight scene and flirting at the wrestling match is fun, as well as the first date meet cute. Rupert Marmalade’s return with its homages to Silence of the Lambs is a great callback. The sleep dart humor at the wedding shows some of the edgier jokes of the plot, as a young, vapid party girl marries a callow billionaire. So much of the movie is an exercise in the hedonistic treadmill (Friend is screaming right now as she reads that phrase for the eightieth time since I’ve left her house) and the learning of what does and does not bring joy.
There are other elements of the movie that feel less original: the fart in space is basically the exact same joke as the one in the much worse Hit Pig, but the fact that I’m even bringing up that movie shows how badly they botched the space humor. The Russian fangirl pig character is not properly sketched out and ends up doing stuff that she doesn’t seem like she was originally sourced for as part of the criminal syndicate she’s a member of. Two of the three of the new criminals feel like they’re sort of fulfilling the same role even as the talent behind those new voices is incredible.
Some questions remain even after the sequel: why are all of the characters so lazily named? They’re all the animal they are as if there aren’t others of their species, even though in the first movie we clearly see Dr Marmalade (gerbil?) urge the Bad Guys to help liberate other gerbils who are being lab-tested by humans, who, by the way, ALSO appear to be able to communicate with their bipedal animal peers with no issues, but the gerbils that are being freed lack speech or clothes or anything that gives the main characters and their surrounding entourage their spark of life. So there’s like this weird underclass of animals and no indication by the script for the most part about the way that the animals serve as both an archetype and a character? Like, in BG2, someone clearly talks about the way that Snake is “such a snake” and how Fox is “crazy like a,” but what does that phrase actually mean if there’s literally one talking snake and fox fulfilling that role. Or are they all going by, like, a family name? Unclear.
