Nate At The Movies

THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS.

My last two visits to the theater for a DreamWorks movie have been pretty fantastic, to say the least. How to Train Your Dragon (2025) was surprisingly awesome and well-realized, and The Wild Robot currently sits in my Top 25 movies of all time. This studio had a lot to live up to going into The Bad Guys 2—the sequel to a messy first film that I still quite enjoyed—and it delivered in all the places that I thought it would, while coming up short in some pretty important areas.

The Bad Guys franchise has clearly done three things well in its two movies: voice casting, music, and animation. I loved the group of actors they picked for the first film—they had great chemistry and brought very distinct personalities to each character—and they did it again with the Bad Girls! Danielle Brooks, Natasha Lyonne, and Maria Bakalova killed it, bringing an edge to the new villains and engineering an entertaining relationship with the Good/Bad Guys.

Daniel Pemberton’s score was also sensational, equally heroic and bombastic, and I loved how he brought the melody from “Good Tonight” into the score and used it as the team’s heroic theme. While his Spider-Verse scores have been his magnum opus, people are sleeping on the Bad Guys score; they’re great!

More than anything else, though, The Bad Guys crush it in the animation department, with confident aesthetics and eye-popping colors. I thought this movie had some especially well-choreographed sequences, too, especially that first car chase sequence. This franchise is DreamWorks’ most stylish, that’s for sure.

Unfortunately, where this sequel really slipped up was its story. Don’t get me wrong, I liked the Bad Girls and the double-crossing and the space race, but I needed some sort of internal dilemma or character development from the Bad Guys that was just nowhere to be found. Wolf especially has a big change of heart in the first film, but now that the Bad Guys are good, there isn’t much left to change within them. It’s less the fault of the writers and more the consequence of the closure of the first film, but the narrative felt unusually weak here.

Even with somewhat thin moral and ethical drama, I still had a good time with The Bad Guys 2. The very second that this franchise gets an A-list writer in the room, they’ll take off. If they get Chris Sanders, Joel Crawford, or Dean DeBlois in there, this franchise could become great. For now, it’ll settle as a stylistically rich, insanely fun, and narratively sparse animated pair, of which I’d love to see a third.