Description: “a caper,” there’s something refreshingly old-fashioned and simple about “The Bad Guys.”
No singing, no dancing, no moral lessons — it’s just a cartoon, with fast-talking, wise-cracking animals, lots of silly car chases and a host of fart gags.
Based on comic books written by Aaron Blabey in Australia and riffing on the Heist-movie category. “The Bad Guys”A band of bank-robbery villains follows. They’re not so much Reservoir Dogs as Mr. Wolf, Mr. Snake, Mr. Piranha, Mr. Shark, and Ms. Tarantula who, in public penance for their criminal ways, are sworn to go straight. Let’s take a look.
Half the fun is trying to work out who’s doing the voice work. As a nod to the “Ocean’s” movies, the handsome, silver-grey Mr. Wolf is continually being likened in the script to George Clooney, although he’s voiced by Sam Rockwell, a performance I’d actually very much like to have witnessed in the live-action flesh.
The film’s diversity comes in the rest of the voice casting, with Anthony Ramos (“In the Heights”Awkwafina plays the fiery, flatulent Piranha. ) as the tech-savvy Tarantula. She uses all eight of her legs to work quickly on multiple keyboards in order to hack security systems and police computers.
Marc Maron’s sidekick Snake is an unhappy one, while Craig Robinson enjoys having great fun with his lumbering Shark. (In Marc Maron’s defense, he could hide a dorsal Fin.
Zazie beetz, a charming local governor, and Alex Borstein, a perpetually frustrated police chief, are the other members of the cast. They also have the wonderfully cartoonish Luggins name. Finally, there’s Richard Ayoade’s Professor Marmelade, a billionaire guinea-pig evil mastermind (it’s the English accent, you see), whose pious yet popular front allows him to turn the eponymous baddies into heroes for his own malevolent plans.
Written by Etan Cohen“Holmes & Watson”), this is a very busy, over-stuffed caper, with twists, tangents, incidental scenes that whizz by under the fast and furious direction of French animator Pierre Perifel, who channels a 1970s vibe with a funky score composed by the prolific Daniel Pemberton (Apple TV+’s “The Afterparty”) and visual referencesTo everything from “Bullitt” “Gone in 60 Seconds” to “The Blues Brothers” and “The Hot Rock.”
Perifel opts for a Saturday-morning-TV look in this age of smooth CGI animation. That said, in its throwback, kinetic frenzy, this DreamWorks film does suffer from a lack of emotional momentum, missing out on the sort of all-around character development we’ve come to expect in the Pixar age. The bad guys might be going straight, but quite often, the whole thing feels like it’s drifting into chaos.
It may seem diverting, “The Bad Guys” is the sort of movie that’s missing a big heart and, at times, feels like they’re having more fun in the ADR booth than we are watching it on screen. There are plenty of gags, some of which are funny, including a surreal chase finale that involved an unfinished motorway as well as a helicopter and meteorite. Also, there is a lethal tsunami of hypnotized Guinea Pigs. Like the film’s premise suggests, nothing this fun-looking can be all bad.
“The Bad Guys”Opening in US theatres April 22.