By Joshua Tyler
| Published
The golden age of Disney and Pixar is long gone, and modern animated family movies rarely exert much effort anymore. Enter The Bad Guys 2, a sequel to an okay adaptation of a series of graphic novels for children. The sequel is more than OK, it’s a blast.
The Bad Guys made plenty of money by being alright. The sequel could have made similar money by being alright again. They didn’t have to try all that hard, which is why they deserve tons of praise. Try hard is exactly what the Bad Guys 2 team did.
Bad Guys 2 is better than the first Bad Guys in nearly every way. It’s a wild animated adventure with its own sense of style and nonstop momentum set to one of the best motion picture soundtracks of the year. The score by Daniel Pemberton is fantastic, but it’ll get almost no credit because it’s in a kids’ movie that isn’t trying to be serious.
Pemberton is a legitimate talent. He did the score for the first Bad Guys, but he’s also the ear behind the noteworthy music in Spider-Man: Into The Spiderverse.
The score especially shines during the movie’s best action sequence. It’s one of the most energetic, fun, cartoony rocket launches ever laid out on screen. The movie’s almost worth seeing just to watch Wolf, Snake, Shark, Piranha, and Legs scaling that rocket in mid-flight. It leads to the second-best space sequence of the year, beaten out only by the wild space chase in Marvel’s new Fantastic Four.
By now, I probably should have explained that this franchise is about a group of traditionally evil characters (The Big Bad Wolf, for example) who decide to stop being bad and try to be good. The second movie begins where the first movie left off, with our heroes having completed their transition away from being villains, only to discover that no one trusts them and they can’t get a job.
They get wrapped up in a heist with other still-bad guys, and things spin out of control. What’s important is that every movie frame is packed with something exciting and fun. It never stops moving and creating.
In that sense, Bad Guys 2 captures the feeling of the books. If you’ve read any of them with your kids, you know the strength of Aaron Blabey’s books is how free they feel, as if anything and everything is always on the table at all times. The books are a non-stop thrill, and the sequel captures that better than the first movie.
I’m not suggesting here that this is the kind of movie adults should seek out, without kids. You’ll need someone under the age of 12 along with you to enjoy what The Bad Guys 2 has to offer. But if you go, you’ll love this turbo-charged cartoon ride.
THE BAD GUYS 2 REVIEW SCORE
