![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/image-2025-08-05T193621.822.webp?resize=647%2C1024&ssl=1\")
<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\nI have fond memories of \u201cThe Bad Guys\u201d from 2022. The opening scene was an extended \u201cPulp Fiction\u201d reference, which I was not expecting to see in an animated kids\u2019 movie. It put me in a good mood for the rest of the movie, which was standard \u201cvillains eventually learn to be good\u201d fare, albeit with a slick style and nary an irritating Minion in sight. \u201cThe Bad Guys 2\u201d doesn\u2019t have the cushion of an extended reference to one of my favorite very-R-rated movies, so it has to get by on style and humor alone. It succeeds, but to a lesser degree.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
When we last saw Mr. Wolf (Sam Rockwell), Mr. Snake (Marc Maron), Mr. Shark (Craig Robinson), Mr. Piranha (Anthony Ramos), and tarantula Ms. Webs (Awkwafina), they had renounced their heist-crew ways after defeating villainous guinea pig Professor Marmalade (Richard Ayoade) with some help from Governor Foxington (Zazie Beetz), herself a reformed master criminal. They were all set to put their smarts and skills to good use, and as is typical of sequels, we open by learning that not much came of it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In the first movie, people didn\u2019t give The Bad Guys a chance because they were of unappealing species, so they turned to lives of crime. Now people don\u2019t want to give them a chance because they have histories leading lives of crime. They keep screwing up job interviews, sometimes because of prejudice, sometimes out of nervousness, and sometimes because they keep applying to places they\u2019ve robbed. They\u2019re getting increasingly frustrated and desperate with their inability to find a legitimate place in the world \u2013 not to mention the cash flow problem. Just when they think things can\u2019t get any worse, they find out that the local police commissioner (Alex Borstein) suspects them in string of heists that for once they aren\u2019t perpetrating.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Bad Guys soon find themselves in the company of The Bad Girls: snow leopard Kitty Kat (Danielle Brooks), raven Doom (Natasha Lyonne), and boar Petrova (Maria Bakalova), the real perpetrators of the crimes. The Bad Girls need The Bad Guys to help pull off an eight-person (that is to say, eight animal) heist against a tech magnate (Colin Jost) who owns a giant magnet that they can use to steal all the world\u2019s gold. The Bad Guys go along with the heist with plans of sabotaging it later, ostensibly because The Bad Girls have blackmail material on good friend Foxington (who has her own strategy for foiling the plan that involves visiting the imprisoned Marmalade, \u201cSilence of the Lambs\u201d-style, which I\u2019m counting as less funny than the \u201cPulp Fiction\u201d stuff from the first movie), but also possibly because they miss the Bad Guy lifestyle. Will The Bad Guys succeed in stopping The Bad Girls, fail to stop them, or be brought back over to the side of Bad permanently?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
My biggest problem with \u201cThe Bad Guys 2\u201d is that it\u2019s all about The Bad Guys \u201cstopping\u201d The Bad Girls, instead of trying to teach them why they shouldn\u2019t be Bad Girls. There are some late-stage debates in the course of fights about how it\u2019s better to be respected than feared, but it\u2019s like they\u2019re trying to convince themselves, rather than their opponents, that they\u2019re \u201cbetter\u201d than their new adversaries. Aside from that, the humor just isn\u2019t as sharp as I remember from the first movie, though I might have been viewing that movie through rose-colored glasses after the opening sequence. The good news is that there\u2019s still plenty of decent humor and still a good time to be had with these movies, even in the case of the inferior sequel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Grade: B-<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe Bad Guys 2\u201d is rated PG for action\/mild violence, rude humor and language. Its running time is 104 minutes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
By Bob Garver I have fond memories of \u201cThe Bad Guys\u201d from 2022. The opening scene was an extended \u201cPulp Fiction\u201d reference, which I was not expecting to see… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":57083,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_seopress_robots_follow":"","_seopress_robots_imageindex":"","_seopress_robots_snippet":"","_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"13","_seopress_robots_breadcrumbs":"","_seopress_robots_freeze_modified_date":"","_seopress_robots_custom_modified_date":"","_seopress_robots_canonical":"","_seopress_social_fb_title":"","_seopress_social_fb_desc":"","_seopress_social_fb_img":"","_seopress_social_fb_img_attachment_id":0,"_seopress_social_fb_img_width":0,"_seopress_social_fb_img_height":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_title":"","_seopress_social_twitter_desc":"","_seopress_social_twitter_img":"","_seopress_social_twitter_img_attachment_id":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_img_width":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_img_height":0,"_seopress_redirections_value":"","_seopress_redirections_enabled":"","_seopress_redirections_enabled_regex":"","_seopress_redirections_logged_status":"","_seopress_redirections_param":"","_seopress_redirections_type":0,"_seopress_analysis_target_kw":"","inline_featured_image":false,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"wpai_generated_summary":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":true,"token":"eyJpbWciOiJodHRwczpcL1wvaTAud3AuY29tXC9sYWtlbGFuZGdhemV0dGUuaW5mb1wvbmV3c1wvd3AtY29udGVudFwvdXBsb2Fkc1wvMjAyNVwvMDhcL2ltYWdlLTIwMjUtMDgtMDVUMTkzNjIxLjgyMi53ZWJwP2ZpdD02NDclMkMxMDI0JnNzbD0xIiwidHh0IjoiVGhlIEJhZCBHdXlzIDIgXHUyMDEzIE1vdmllIFJldmlldyIsInRlbXBsYXRlIjoiaGlnaHdheSIsImZvbnQiOiIiLCJibG9nX2lkIjoxNjMwNDA2NjF9.jniPruyaSlMRC-6nWr4ldGzton3tKIsJBgh2or9739oMQ"},"version":2,"attached_media":[{"id":57083,"url":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/image-2025-08-05T193621.822.webp","type":"image\/png"}]},"_wpas_customize_per_network":false},"categories":[13],"tags":[11928],"class_list":["post-57082","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-movie-reviews","tag-the-bad-guys-2-movie-review"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57082","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=57082"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57082\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":57084,"href":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57082\/revisions\/57084"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/57083"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=57082"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=57082"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=57082"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}