The Bad Guys 2

The Weight of the Steal

How do you make a heist feel dangerous when the criminals are made of pixels and ink? It is a problem that plagues almost every animated caper. Without the physical threat of a bullet or the tactile click of a heavy vault tumbler, the stakes usually evaporate into weightless color. I was thinking about this during the opening minutes of *The Bad Guys 2*, Pierre Perifel's slick, hyper-caffeinated follow-up to his 2022 sleeper hit. We open on a flashback in Cairo, watching our titular crew—a wolf, a snake, a shark, a piranha, and a tarantula—operating at the absolute peak of their villainous prime. It is a sequence that moves with the jazzy, irreverent kineticism of *Lupin III*, throwing the camera through impossible gaps while maintaining a stubborn grip on real-world cinematography. (Perifel clearly loves a good live-action lens flare). Yet the real trick of this movie is not the stealing. It is the punishing, unglamorous reality of what happens when the stealing stops.



The film picks up in the present with our reformed predators trying, and spectacularly failing, to integrate into normal society. No one wants to hire a predatory ex-con. It is a surprisingly sharp metaphor for the systemic hurdles of rehabilitation, dressed up in a bright, sketchbook-style aesthetic. Notice the way Sam Rockwell voices Mr. Wolf. For years, Rockwell has been live-action cinema's patron saint of nervous, fast-talking men hiding their deep insecurities. Here, he channels that exact frequency through a canine avatar. Wolf carries himself like Danny Ocean, but the animation betrays him—a slight droop in the ears, a defensive tightening of his posture when a job interview goes south. He wants to be good so badly that it actually hurts. The emotional friction works beautifully, especially when the crew is inevitably framed for a crime during a chaotic lucha libre wrestling tournament and forced back into the underworld. They cross paths with "The Bad Girls," a rival crew featuring Natasha Lyonne as a raven named Doom, whose gravelly, deadpan romance with Marc Maron's endlessly cynical Mr. Snake is easily the film's weirdest and best delight.



Yet the sequel trap is a relentless master. To up the ante, the narrative eventually abandons its grounded Los Angeles hustle for a bloated third act involving outer space, a giant magnet, and stolen gold. When the canvas gets too big, the characters shrink. *Paste Magazine*'s Jesse Hassenger diagnosed this perfectly, noting that the action "eventually feels like a whole lot of pirouettes and flips around a security system that is not really there." He is entirely right. You cannot feel the weight of a vault door when everyone is suddenly defying gravity in the stratosphere.



Even so, the machinery hums. Perifel and co-director JP Sans refuse to let their characters fall into the plastic, dead-eyed look of standard 3D animation. There is a scratchy, hand-drawn vibrancy to the way a getaway car drifts around a corner, or the way Snake coils himself up in a defensive knot. Even when the script loses its footing, the visual language remains articulate. *The Bad Guys 2* absolutely bites off more than it can chew, trading the intimate jazz-club swagger of the original for stadium-rock bombast. Whether that is a flaw or a feature comes down to your patience with spectacle. Yet beneath the noise, the film remembers the cardinal rule of the con. You have to make the mark care. Against all odds, I still cared about the Wolf.