Mark Reviews Movies: THE BAD GUYS

The Bad Guys, Universal Pictures

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Review by Mark Dujsik | April 21, 2022

The main gag of The Bad Guys, in which an animal gang of robbers try and fail and try again to become decent and law-abiding, is solid. The little gags of director Pierre Perifel's animated comedy are even better. This is essentially a heist movie with a few vital lessons about what it means to be good, not judging others based on stereotypes and assumptions, and the meaning of real friendship. All of that is fine—and probably more than that—for the kids who know Aaron Blabey's book series, upon which this film is based.

As for everyone else in the audience, Etan Cohen's screenplay is quite a bit of fun as a clever homage to and silly send-up of the conventions of heist movies. We kind of expect the silliness, given the central conceit of anthropomorphic animals as a team of professional thieves, but the smartness here comes as a bit of a surprise. One has to admire a film that makes room for and does both—while also doing both well, by the way, which is trickier than it might seem.

The film's influences are present from the start, as we meet Mr. Wolf (voice of Sam Rockwell), an actual wolf, and Mr. Snake (voice of Marc Maron), a Hawaiian shirt-adorned slithering reptile. Those in the know will catch a few things immediately, such as the diner locale where the two are chatting and the fact that the conversation has nothing to do with the business at hand. They casually talk about food, and if the work of Quentin Tarantino isn't alluded to enough with the staging and even the lighting of the scene, the fact that our protagonist shares a name with a particularly memorable Tarantino creation probably should make the influence apparent.

The gag is that Wolf and his team, known throughout their home of Los Angeles as "the Bad Guys," are natural predators, which makes their work of stealing all the easier. In the diner, the human patrons are cowering against the walls and in the corners, and when Wolf and Snake cross the street to enter a bank, customers and staff just start fleeing, leaving the two to walk out of the bank with a couple bags of cash and without any trouble.

In the middle of the resulting chase with the cops, Wolf introduces us—with the camera keeping at a safe distance from, you know, a wolf—to the rest of the crew. Mr. Shark (voice of Craig Robinson) is a Great White shark who's also a master of disguise, which is so improbable in theory and in practice that the joke touches upon the absurd—wisely, perhaps, since it provides us with the idea, as well as the hilarious sight, of Shark stealing the Mona Lisa while disguised as the painting itself.

Ms. Tarantula (voice of Awkwafina) is the arachnid hacker and tech wizard of the team, and those extra legs come in handy with all the unnecessary tapping on keys and keyboard extensions. Finally, there's Mr. Piranha (voice of Anthony Ramos), who's the muscle of the crew, with a short-fused temper and an unfortunate habit of nervous flatulence. Some might pooh-pooh the gas-passing on principle, but in all things, there must be balance—the smart to counter the fart and the fart to better appreciate the smart. Besides, that noxious green cloud causing problems for the team is funny.

Anyway, the plot has the Bad Guys, currently at the top of the criminal food chain in the city, planning their most ambitious robbery yet: to steal a Good Samaritan award right in the middle of the banquet where it's being presented. The sequence gives us the team's plan up front and then watches it unfold, with clockwork precision leading to a bunch of close-calls and improvisation on account of deadly lasers and other obstacles. Again, it's the little touches that are most amusing here, such as Shark's attempt to subtly distract a crowd by announcing that he's giving birth and the pintsized Piranha knocking out a human waiter—only for the waiter's outfit to fit the little fish perfectly.

The crew's attempts to do good come when they're caught, and Professor Marmalade (voice of Richard Ayoade), the guinea pig recipient of the award and philanthropist, proposes an experiment to turn the Bad Guys into generally good guys. Governor Diane Foxington (voice of Zazie Beetz), a fox (natch), agrees with the idea, and the crew—some more slowly than others—start to learn the benefits of being good, while being recruited by Marmalade to perform a heist to rescue lab animals, being tempted to try stealing the award again, and being caught up in a conspiracy that forces them to try stealing for good reasons again.

In fairness, the story isn't as engaging when it's going through the more serious, sentimental, and familiar path of these characters learning those lessons. Like in any heist story, though, there are plenty of twists, betrayals, secret alliances, and last-moment revelations that keep the plotting spry, the characters dynamic, and the humor at the forefront.

Meanwhile, the animation style, which has the dimension of computer animation but the texture of hand-drawn art, is subtly striking, and the central members of the vocal cast, particularly a smooth Rockwell (whose character turns "Clooney" into a verb) and a playfully secretive Beetz, are quite good. Ayoade's Marmalade stands out for reasons that can't be explained, if only for a reason that, well, also cannot be explained, because surprises in a film like this are still important.

The Bad Guys itself is a pleasant surprise. It's intelligent as a genre riff, but more importantly, the film is intelligent enough to know that the inherent silliness of this kind of material should be taken seriously.

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