Pierre Perifel’s 2022 animated film “The Bad Guys” wanted you to second guess the title. Yes, the main characters (all anthropomorphized animals) were criminals. But society had also marked them as “bad” from the start, before they had pulled their first caper, by virtue of being creatures we traditionally fear and despise: predators, insects and reptiles.
How, the film asked, do we determine who the “bad guys” are? And if you’re marked as “bad” from the start, can you ever make good?
It was a kid-friendly moral meditation, based on a series of graphic novels by Aaron Blabey and brought to life with stunningly inventive animation. And now “The Bad Guys 2” has arrived, with new conundrums for our furry ex-felons. What does it take to change for the better? Does our society actually allow for rehabilitation and redemption?
The first film introduced us to an “Ocean’s 11”-style crew of zany but hypercompetent professional thieves. There’s the charismatic mastermind Mr. Wolf (Sam Rockwell), the sinuous safecracker Mr. Snake (Marc Maron), the master of disguise Mr. Shark (Craig Robinson), the pugnacious Mr. Piranha (Anthony Ramos), and the multi-legged hacker Ms. Tarantula or “Webs” (Awkwafina). The first film saw the Bad Guys realize that they didn’t have to fulfill the villainous roles cast for them by society, and decide to change their ways. “The Bad Guys 2” picks up a little while later, with our heroes out of prison and struggling to stay on the straight and narrow.
It’s not easy. At every job interview they’re held in suspicion or hostility because of their criminal pasts. Their old nemesis Chief Luggins (Alex Borstein), now the commissioner, keeps a watchful eye on them, waiting for them to slip. They get some help from their friend Governor Diane Foxington (Zazie Beetz)—secretly a reformed criminal herself—but are otherwise on their own. They share a sparse apartment and one comically junky car. Abandoning crime, it seems, doesn’t pay.
Things get worse when the Bad Guys are blackmailed by a new heist crew known as the Bad Girls: Kitty Kat (Danielle Brooks), Susan (Natasha Lyonne) and Pigtail (Marisa Bakalova). If the Bad Guys don’t assist the Bad Girls in an ambitious scheme, they will be framed for crimes they didn’t commit and lose their chance at redemption. At first the gang only agrees in order to clear their names, but Wolf starts to realize that he misses the thrill, and easy rewards, of criminal life. As Kitty asks him: “What if the bad life was your best life?”
The sequel keeps many of the elements that made the first film so fun and charming, including its sincere commitment to the heist genre. The action scenes are fluid and exciting, heightened by an animation style that combines the dynamic cel shading of “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse” with the insane physics of Chuck Jones. Anime is an enormous influence here, the flashy action and deranged stylistic improvisations recalling everything from “Lupin III” to Hayao Miyazaki to “FLCL.” In layman’s terms: It’s incredible to look at, for children and parents alike. With a clever script and top notch voice talent, it is easily among the best family films out this summer.
It is also the only summer movie that you could use to talk to your kids about restorative justice and recidivism. Mainstream kids movies have largely abandoned traditional villains in recent years, but the good guy/bad guy dichotomy remains stubbornly alive. Even in my household, with two Dorothy-Day-quoting, non-profit employees for parents, my children play games where “bad guys” need to be beaten, captured and sent to jail. Some of that is a function their ages; my children are in the early stages of their moral formation. But they have already absorbed the good guy/bad guy dichotomy as an essential part of what makes our culture function.
How can we understand ourselves as good and righteous if we don’t have villains to contrast ourselves against? How can we justify our military spending and surveillance state and prisons-for-profit system if we don’t have a perpetual group of “bad guys” for them to target? Plenty of family movies depict their heroes growing in empathy for perceived villains, but “The Bad Guys 2” cuts out the middle man by aligning our sympathies with them. That’s an important, and effective, challenge to the imagination.
After watching the film my 9-year-old couldn’t offer incisive commentary on the state of our criminal justice system, but could identify that it was wrong that the Bad Guys continued to be excluded from society because of past mistakes. Sister Helen Prejean, famous for her ministry to death row inmates, likes to say “Everybody’s worth more than the worst thing they’ve ever done.”
That’s an essential message, but my kids are too young to read “Dead Man Walking.” They are just the right age, however, to get that same message from a cartoon wolf.
