The Bad Guys
Year: 2022
Rating: PG
Length: 100 minutes / 1.67 hours
I honestly love that computer technology has improved so much that animated movies like The Bad Guys (2022) don’t have to use super-realistic visuals and can instead have a stylized animation that gives it a lot of personality. What’s a little astonishing to me is how this film is the first animated movie I can think of that takes the “heist” genre and runs with it. I love a good heist, after all. And while the twists are a bit obvious and the moral is a bit hokey, The Bad Guys is still a lot of fun.
There’s no reason to blame The Bad Guys for making a movie that children can figure out. It’s loosely based on a series of children’s books, so I get that some twists are going to be obvious to the adults in the audience. The thing that strikes me weird is that all the characters that had any significant role in the movie were animals, but everyone else in this universe is human (with the Chief of Police (Alex Borstein) being the exception to this rule). I guess it’s difficult to do a full animal world like Zootopia (2016).
Surprisingly enough, even for an animated movie for kids, The Bad Guys only had a few moments that fit the low bar of comedy for the genre. Even these occasional fart jokes actually mattered to the plot, which was quite astonishing considering their standard comic relief status. Instead, The Bad Guys was full of excellent voice acting, exciting action sequences, and well-developed characters. This movie clearly learned from great heist films like Ocean’s Eleven (2001) on how to be smart, cool, and badass in one tight package.
The best animated heist film I’ve ever seen, I give The Bad Guys 4.0 stars out of 5.
