Rating: ★★★★ (4.0/5)
This review may contain spoilers.
I love The Bad Guys. It’s one of my favorite animated movies of all time. It’s like Oceans 11 made for kids but with enough adult stuff going on that grown-ups can enjoy it just as much. I wish I could be 10% as cool as Wolf in these movies and I might have a small crush on Diane Foxington, but that’s just a holdover from my Robin Hood days as a kid.
The Bad Guys 2 is definitely a worthy sequel to the first one. I was nervous because when we meet our “bad guys” they’re actually “good guys” and I wasn’t sure how much of the movie would be taken up by getting them back up to speed. Lucky for us this thing kicks off pretty dang quick and in one of the most fun ways it could. With a a luchador wrestling match! I did not see that coming, and it was absolute insanity.
The beginning of this movie really does take some time to pull itself together and get us rolling along in a way that pulled me in. It took me a minute to reacclimate myself to the universe and buy into all the nonsense going on. This one takes everything we loved about the first movie and dials it up to eleven. Which isn’t that different from the books, if I recall. Our plot has definitely deviated from the source material, but I don’t think that’s a bad thing. The books go so far off the rails its hard to imagine where they could end up. This one takes us to some wild places, but it does that because animation can do that, and it’s super fun to watch it happen.
I really love this era of animation we’re in as a whole. We went through well over a decade of everything looking like a Pixar movie, and we’re in a place now where studios are taking risks and trying new visual styles. Even this movie differs from the first one in some of the risks they take with 2D stuff, anime influenced action, and other styles mixed in. It’s so fun to watch this thing and I couldn’t help but grin ear to ear.
It does follow many of the same beats as the first one, but I’m not going to complain about it. We need car chases and we need Diane kicking the crap out of people in elaborate action scenes because it’s awesome. Those scenes were cool in the first movie and were a highlight, and they just dialed it up here. They might be roughly the same, but they’re fun to watch and I can’t be mad at that.
All in all, I’m glad this movie got made. I’m hoping we can get another one because it really is some of my favorite stuff. The music, the cast, the animation style, the action, the bonkers story. It all works for me. I’m excited about it and would love to watch it again.