The Bad Guys 2: Lively But Safe

It's the same story we've heard over and over again. First, a filmmaker looking to make movies gets connected with a company looking to make money, then the filmmaker delivers a film that makes a lot of it, thirdly, the company asks him to do it again, and lastly, the filmmaker creates a sequel so indistinguishable from the first that it seems like getting his tongue stuck on a popsicle is a greater concern than whether or not the sequel will actually make money. The Bad Guys 2 is about as ambitious as an old woman who's worked at the local grocer for the last forty years, but even if it hasn't built meaningfully on the original in almost any way, it effortlessly recaptures all its familiar charm and style.

By now, the infamous bad guys have had all the trouble in the world integrating into law-abiding society, which often occurs when one adopts the persona of the notorious criminal. They also happen to make for a super-easy scapegoat, which a group of all-female supercriminals takes full advantage of before long. For as hard as Mr. Wolf, Mr. Snake, Mr. Piranha, Mr. Shark, and Ms. Tarantula have tried to be good, all it's going to take to knock over their flimsy house of cards is a well-timed and well-placed push from these Bad Girls. Their unwilling job? Steal an experimental space rocket. This movie is hyper-familiar, and I think that's the effective, if sometimes mundane point. The Bad Guys 2 attempts to serve as an introduction to heist movies for children, and on that level, it succeeds, even if it's little more than a collection of tropes thrown into the blender on top of adorable, animated animals, and even if it's going to be all too familiar to anyone above a certain age. Another part of this success is a familiar animation style that's still aged better than fine wine.

The Bad Guys 2 brings the electrically smooth, seemingly pencil-drawn animation of the first movie back for another spin. It's nothing particularly revolutionary this time around, but you knew that. The animators manage to do far more than merely make their movie look good - the amount of freakishly clever visual gags packed into the scenery of this movie amazed me. The movie's dialogue is funny in its own right, filled to the brim with jokes, but this movie is like a comedy show where the best jokes are the silent, visual payoffs. It rediscovers and re-pokes the perfectly chaotic and slapstick funny bone of the first movie all over again in a nonstop assembly line of both visual and spoken jokes running on ridiculous overtime.

Spitting the humor is a largely familiar cast of characters that is equally as interesting as they were in the first movie, apart from the fact that a few of them have changed and grown in some intriguing ways. Take Snake, for instance. He was a cold soul in the first movie, but I'll just say that he's not exactly the same serpent that he was before; yes, I laughed, in a good way. This movie works really well on the micro scale among its characters, and this made me wish that it worked equally well on the macro scale, too. The pacing of nearly every single scene in this movie is wildly frenetic. While it remains very watchable, many of the drop-of-a-hat plot developments completely alter the entire trajectory of the movie in seconds. I often felt as though this movie didn't have all the pieces to its own puzzle, as if it decided to make do with slapdash plot twists when it should have slowed down and taken the time to dot all of its I's and cross all the T's. The gaps are there to see.

Ultimately, The Bad Guys 2 suffers more from imagining too little than it does from imagining too much, and overfamiliarity is still a problem, even if you're trying to function as an introduction to familiar tropes for kids. Still, it remains a solid animated movie with a fun visual style and a more-than-watchable cast of characters. The question of which heist movies it will borrow from for a potential Bad Guys 3 is actually a lot more interesting to me than even I expected, and I'd be down to see more of this, even if I'd just be scratching an old itch again rather than bearing witness to anything particularly game-changing.

The Bad Guys 2 - 7/10

Mark 11:25