The Bad Guys: An Undeniably Fun Theft of Ideas

Based on a series of graphic novels bearing the same name, I cannot figure out for the life of me why the filmmakers portray some of the animals in The Bad Guys like people and others like animals. It's an occasionally uncanny experience, but to give this movie the benefit of the doubt, it'll be hard for me to tell the difference between people and animals until we all collectively swear off social media. But I hyperbolically digress. DreamWorks is right around the corner from releasing a sequel to their animated 2022 caper comedy, and so I thought it prudent to get down off my feet, sit my lazy self on the couch, and watch this movie, a story of talking animals ever-so-subtly named the bad guys who speed, rob, and scare their way through LA. And if the relationship between man and animal in this movie wasn't already confusing enough, actual people comically flee from the bad guys when they so much as show their faces in public. Think of it like the opposite of if a celebrity walked into your local diner, and you'll get the picture. This movie is extremely familiar, but it remains a fun introduction of some well-worn action and heist movie tropes for younger audiences, though the adults in the room will certainly appreciate some of the subtleties that will fly over the heads of the young'uns.

The animation style of The Bad Guys is unusually artsy, as if someone took a Pixar movie and sketched over the top of it with a colored pencil. It's making some obvious statements, but when your visuals talk this smoothly, it's hard not to listen. This movie can also be quite funny. My favorite running joke has to be how every passerby flees when the bad guys so much as show their faces in public. Mr. Wolf and his crew are no Michael Myers or Freddy Kruegers, and jokes like this add surprising layers of self-awareness to The Bad Guys. It probably goes without saying that big groups of characters are hard to get right in movies, and for all intents and purposes, this movie does a mostly-impressive job of it. Still, every character other than Mr. Wolf is defined by their most prominent personality trait, and while they're fun, this team is admittedly one-dimensional. Wolf himself is both a bit deeper and my personal favorite of the bunch, a bad guy finding out for himself that maybe it would be a little bit more exciting to live a life of good for a change.

Still, despite impressive animation, excellent staging of setpieces, some fun characters, and some largely great humor, the biggest crime of The Bad Guys would have to be that it's so overbearingly familiar. It's a heist movie and a redemption story in the same breath, both extremely familiar tropes done to death and desecrated in their graves. Except this time, the criminals are all talking animals. Get ready to see all the familiar double-crosses, all the same big secrets revealed, and all the old tropes revisited. The Bad Guys may be fun, but it's anything but fresh. It's almost like the filmmakers lifted a mid-2000s heist film screenplay from a vault somewhere and decided to replace all the characters with animals. The bad guys themselves may steal many things, but the story they're a part of steals all the ideas and rarely ever tries to make them its own. Yet the tropes remain fun, and when you can assemble a crew this charismatic and magnetic, it almost makes sense that you might want to compare them to their inspiration, even closely. And honestly, it's a fun enough movie to the point where I'm nearly tempted to say who cares? Because sometimes, enjoying things is more fun than not.

The Bad Guys is every heist movie you've ever seen, just featuring ridiculously charismatic talking animals rather than Dwayne Johnson and some woman ten years his junior. It's a safe crime movie that doesn't bother to steal inspiration from elsewhere, but I won't lie to you - it remains bucketloads of fun despite its familiarity. The characters are fun, the thefts are fun, the tropes are made to be fun, and it all adds up to be time charmingly well-spent at the expense of every bank in town. Mr. Wolf and his company of crooks are a ball to watch, even if they sometimes commit the crime of imagining too little rather than too much. But for a movie this high-energy, I think that's a forgivable offense.

The Bad Guys - 7/10

Proverbs 21:3