How to be good when you're so very good at being bad? That’s the dilemma facing Mr Wolf, Mr Shark, Ms Tarantula and Mr. Piranha in this frenetic and entertaining sequel to DreamWorks 2022 animation Bad Guys.
Watch our interviews with the cast of Bad Guys 2
Now firmly on civvy street after a spell in clink, the anthropomorphic crew of former safe crackers, tech geniuses and criminal masterminds are struggling to readjust. The thrill is gone and it won’t be found in a crummy 9 to 5 and the beat-up hatchback the debonair Mr Wolf is now forced to drive.
Meanwhile the rest of the world is still blaming them, like Macavity the mystery cat, for every bad deed done. With their recidivist ways and taste for danger, this can’t last long so it’s almost a blessing when the bad guys are kidnapped by an all-female crime gang, led by a devious snow leopard called Kitty Kat, and blackmailed into pulling off one last heist that goes beyond Auric Goldfinger’s dreams of avarice.
You know the drill. However, if the first Bad Guys flick was a souffle of PG Quentin Tarantino meets Ocean’s Eleven (a franchise that got more and more irksome as it developed), this one dreams big with an opening sequence straight out of Bond and Mission Impossible scale and action throughout.
There is a requisite but inventive fart joke, Mr Shark does a Little Richard impression disguised as a pastor at a tech bro’s wedding and, best of all, super villain guinea pig Mr Marmalade (voiced by Richard Ayoade) is back and now a pumped up and tattooed jailbird.
"Sophisticated stupid,’" is how producer Damon Ross describes these films and there’s plenty of that on show here.
