Review: The Bad Guys 2 is exactly what a sequel should be

I think of DreamWorks movies as being sortable into two broad camps. The first is the more prestigious, textured, emotional camp. Stuff like How to Train Your Dragon, The Wild Robot, or Puss in Boots: The Last Wish. These movies are entertaining and fun, yes, but also clearly have their sights set on the audience's heartstrings, and normally make their way into the thick of awards season. The other camp is stuff that's more purely entertaining. I'm thinking Trolls, Dog Man, and The Bad Guys. Of this latter camp, The Bad Guys is the cream of the crop, prime entertainment, slick and fun and great to look at. Nothing too challenging, but a nice romp. It's apt that the opening credits of these movies refers to them as capers. That's exactly the right word.

The Bad Guys 2, now in theaters, is a perfect example of what a sequel should be. It takes all the ingredients that made its predecessor sing and tunes them up, enhances them, beefs things up where appropriate. The characters grow and are challenged without losing the essence of what made us love them in the first place. The stakes are higher, both on the external world-threatening level and with smaller, character-driven drama. The set-pieces are bigger, taking us through the streets of Cairo, to a lucha libre match, and even into outer space. And the whole thing looks and sounds great, a glistening/sparkling/shimmering bit of top-notch Hollywood entertainment. This is what I want to watch when I think of a summer movie.

Even if you missed the first movie, The Bad Guys 2 does a little legwork to bring you up to speed with a nifty little montage establishing some of the more pertinent plot points that'll help you hit the ground running here. At the end of the first movie, the Bad Guys went good, helping to save the day and turning themselves in to the police, ready to pay the price for their previous life of crime.

When we rejoin them here, they're still paying, albeit in different ways. This isn't a movie that's super thematically rich, but right out of the gate, there is a little commentary about the way we treat former convicts as they try to return to life in the outside world. We find Mr. Wolf and friends trying to find jobs, and being summarily rejected because of their past misdeeds. Yeah, he probably shouldn't be trying to get a job at a bank that he robbed three times, but can't bygones be bygones sometimes? Nah, resume, meet shredder. (As someone who has spent the past eight-ish months job hunting, this sequence was a little triggering for me. Be warned.)

A string of recent robberies has the Bad Guys on high alert, worrying that they might be implicated, and that the public might turn on them (again). Throughout the film, there's a tension between what's easy and what's right. If they wanted to, the gang could easily return to a life of crime and the resultant luxury, even though it would mean betraying their newly-minted morals and some of their new friends and allies. Is it worth being good when life is anything but? The good (bad) old days look really nice when you're on yet another failed interview, and when money is tight.

Wolf decides to contact the newly-promoted police commissioner to help solve the crimes, bringing in his friends one-by-one to help crack the case wide open. It's established that all of the robberies are targeting objects made of the delightfully named MacGuffinite, a strange metal with special magnetic properties. The criminal team (called the Bad Girls, lol) behind the robberies is slowly circling the Bad Guys, wanting to bring them in for one last job, one that's too big for that trio to take on by themselves.

It's a strong premise that let's us have our cake and eat it, too. It isn't undoing the groundwork laid by the first movie, but it also gives the characters an excuse to put their criminal expertise to work. The new characters are great: Kitty Kat (Danielle Brooks) is the clear leader, quick to anger, willing to resort to violence when needed. Doom is a raven with a soft spot for Snake, and is a much better match for Natasha Lyonne's voice than that fuzzball she played in Smurfs. And Maria Bakalova gets a lot of funny lines to chew on as the hulking Pigtail Petrova, a boar who's a huge fan of the Bad Guys.

They all make strong additions to the returning voice cast, led by the sexy-smooth Sam Rockwell. Yes, I still have a crush on Wolf. He makes my tail wag. I howl. Etc. etc. While it's sometimes a little annoying how Hollywood thinks they need to get big stars to voice their animated movies (why not go for, you know, great voice actors, specifically?), these movies are an instance of that practice being done right. Everyone delivers, and the chemistry is great.

The whole time I was watching this, in the back of my mind I was wondering where they could go from here. How many ways can they concoct to have these characters doing heists when they're supposed to have turned over a new leaf? Do they have to go bad again, and then re-turn good again, and then, and then? These movies are based on a book series, so surely there must be more stories, and yeah, by the end, there's a clear set-up for what's next. I will be there day one for The Bad Guys 3, whenever it comes. I love these characters, the snappy animation, the snappy humor, and great action. These movies hit just right, and I hope we get many many more of them.