I have fond memories of “The Bad Guys” from 2022. The opening scene was an extended “Pulp Fiction” reference, which I was not expecting to see in an animated kids’ movie. It put me in a good mood for the rest of the movie, which was standard “villains eventually learn to be good” fare, albeit with a slick style and nary an irritating Minion in sight. “The Bad Guys 2” doesn’t have the cushion of an extended reference to one of my favorite very-R-rated movies, so it has to get by on style and humor alone. It succeeds, but to a lesser degree.
When we last saw Mr. Wolf (Sam Rockwell), Mr. Snake (Marc Maron), Mr. Shark (Craig Robinson), Mr. Piranha (Anthony Ramos), and tarantula Ms. Webs (Awkwafina), they had renounced their heist-crew ways after defeating villainous guinea pig Professor Marmalade (Richard Ayoade) with some help from Governor Foxington (Zazie Beetz), herself a reformed master criminal. They were all set to put their smarts and skills to good use, and as is typical of sequels, we open by learning that not much came of it.
In the first movie, people didn’t give The Bad Guys a chance because they were of unappealing species, so they turned to lives of crime. Now people don’t want to give them a chance because they have histories leading lives of crime. They keep screwing up job interviews, sometimes because of prejudice, sometimes out of nervousness, and sometimes because they keep applying to places they’ve robbed. They’re getting increasingly frustrated and desperate with their inability to find a legitimate place in the world – not to mention the cash flow problem. Just when they think things can’t get any worse, they find out that the local police commissioner (Alex Borstein) suspects them in string of heists that for once they aren’t perpetrating.
The Bad Guys soon find themselves in the company of The Bad Girls: snow leopard Kitty Kat (Danielle Brooks), raven Doom (Natasha Lyonne), and boar Petrova (Maria Bakalova), the real perpetrators of the crimes. The Bad Girls need The Bad Guys to help pull off an eight-person (that is to say, eight animal) heist against a tech magnate (Colin Jost) who owns a giant magnet that they can use to steal all the world’s gold. The Bad Guys go along with the heist with plans of sabotaging it later, ostensibly because The Bad Girls have blackmail material on good friend Foxington (who has her own strategy for foiling the plan that involves visiting the imprisoned Marmalade, “Silence of the Lambs”-style, which I’m counting as less funny than the “Pulp Fiction” stuff from the first movie), but also possibly because they miss the Bad Guy lifestyle. Will The Bad Guys succeed in stopping The Bad Girls, fail to stop them, or be brought back over to the side of Bad permanently?
My biggest problem with “The Bad Guys 2” is that it’s all about The Bad Guys “stopping” The Bad Girls, instead of trying to teach them why they shouldn’t be Bad Girls. There are some late-stage debates in the course of fights about how it’s better to be respected than feared, but it’s like they’re trying to convince themselves, rather than their opponents, that they’re “better” than their new adversaries. Aside from that, the humor just isn’t as sharp as I remember from the first movie, though I might have been viewing that movie through rose-colored glasses after the opening sequence. The good news is that there’s still plenty of decent humor and still a good time to be had with these movies, even in the case of the inferior sequel.
Grade: B-
“The Bad Guys 2” is rated PG for action/mild violence, rude humor and language. Its running time is 104 minutes.
Robert R. Garver is a graduate of the Cinema Studies program at New York University. His weekly movie reviews have been published since 2006.
Last Update: Aug 04, 2025 11:19 am CDT
