Pierre Perifel’s The Bad Guys establishes its breakneck pace right out of the gate, with a nearly 15-minute-long epilogue in which five animals execute a bank heist solely for the adrenaline rush of being pursued by the police. Rarely does this opening stop to catch its breath, with every frame filled with brisk movement and snappy dialogue. The quips may not always land, but each sharp turn introduces a new character or bit of background information—most importantly, that each member of this gang is an animal that’s typically widely feared—that dexterously informs us of the overall group dynamic.
Led by the suave Wolf (Sam Rockwell), this gang of five proves much less compelling whenever they—and by extension the film—let their foot off the accelerator. The opening car chase offers enough visceral thrills to mask any shortcomings in terms of narrative or thematic depth. But as The Bad Guys shifts gears into a smarmy send-up of the Ocean’s movies, it becomes impossible to ignore that it borrows all of its moves from better, more original films. At one point, when Wolf executes the “charm offensive” to win the affections of Governor Diane Foxington (Zazie Beetz), his buddies even call it “the full Clooney.”
The parade of familiar plot twists, along with its exceedingly juvenile humor—this is a film that turns the flatulence of one of its characters, Craig Robinson’s Piranha, into a plot device—only goes on to highlight the hollowness of the whole enterprise. So by the time that Wolf commits himself to changing his ways and becoming one of the good guys, the film has given us little reason to care about his redemption or the rift it causes between him and his friends.
Richard Ayoade hilariously injects some much-needed life into The Bad Guys whenever his Professor Marmalade, a guinea pig whose saintly posturing serves as a smokescreen for his malevolent intentions, is on screen. But not only is the film’s moral messaging as basic as it gets, essentially whittling down to “don’t judge a book by its cover,” it’s further muddied by the fact that Wolf and his pals are much more fun to watch when they’re leading cops on a wild goose chase than when they’re rescuing cats from trees. The kids in the crowd won’t pick up on that dissonance, but any adult who’s seen their fair share of caper films will likely want to, per one of Wolf’s tin-eared puns, “make like a wolf and get the pack out of here.”
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