The Bad Guys 2

“The Bad Guys 2 gives a stellar blueprint for how a franchise can tweak older material to suit today’s audiences.”

Title: The Bad Guys 2 (2025)
Directors: Pierre Perifel 👨🏼🇫🇷 and JP Sans 👨🏼🇻🇪
Writers: Yoni Brenner 👨🏼 and Etan Cohen 👨🏼🇮🇱🇺🇸 based on the books by Aaron Blabey 👨🏼🇦🇺

Reviewed by Li 👩🏻🇺🇸

Technical: 4.25/5

When DreamWorks’ graphic novel adaptation The Bad Guys netted the studio a tidy sum, it was all but guaranteed that a sequel would be coming. Enter The Bad Guys 2, which brings back the original crew of reformed criminals, led by the sardonic Wolf (voiced by Sam Rockwell), as the group of animals struggle to shed their notoriety and prove that they’ve switched to the side of good. During this goal, however, the story gets a bit tangled up in twists and turns. Keeping track of who’s “good” and who’s “bad,” and who’s wavering in between, feels like a task for teens and adults, yet the onscreen antics unfold with bubbly animation and kiddie humor. (There are so many fart jokes.) As an adult viewer, it’s still great fun—the pacing clips along nicely, and the visuals generally hit the mark, besides a couple of random 2D cartoon cutaways that feel gimmicky.

More rewarding is the surprisingly mature message buried beneath the family-friendly veneer: the difficulties that ex-cons face when trying to rebuild their lives and find jobs, as it shows why falling back into crime often feels like the only option. It’s a thoughtful theme, but one that’s too nuanced for younger viewers to grasp without guidance.

Gender: 4/5
Does it pass the Bechdel Test? YES

Among Wolf’s crew of five bandits, just one—Awkwafina’s Ms. Tarantula—is female. Along with The Bad Guys’ villain also being male, and renegade spy Diane Foxington (Zazie Beetz) pigeonholed as Wolf’s love interest, the first movie felt distinctly male-driven. That’s why it’s so welcome that The Bad Guys 2 puts in the effort to address this imbalance.

Nearly all the new characters are women, and while the cast still barely reaches gender parity, the additions are refreshingly diverse, with the women showing various body shapes. Pigtail (Maria Bakalova) brings strength and size, Ms. Tarantula combines brains with a petite frame, and Diane finally feels less tokenized—her role as governor gives her real agency. Her romance with Wolf doesn’t dominate her character anymore, since she’s surrounded by other women who each have their own personalities and relationships with one another.

This includes ringleader Kitty Kat (Danielle Brooks), whose brand of villainy veers towards some racial clichés (which we’ll get into below), but who gets just enough backstory to feel somewhat dimensional. Regardless, I loved seeing women in positions of power: The governor, the police commissioner Misty Luggins (Alex Borstein), and even Kitty as the leader of the “Bad Girls” all call the shots in meaningful ways.

Race: 3/5

The Bad Guys 2 features a diverse voice cast with Black actors Robinson and Beetz playing positive, if colorblind (and therefore simplistic) roles as Shark and Diane. However, there’s a troubling visual pattern where darker-toned characters—including the crow Doom (Natasha Lyonne), dark gray Kitty, and pink Pigtail (who often wears black)—are cast as villains. In contrast, the light-colored hero, Wolf, often wears white. This colorism becomes more pointed when you realize that the main antagonist, Kitty, is also voiced by a dark-skinned Black actor, Brooks.

Looking further down the line, the film handles minor characters of color with mixed results. On the plus side, early scenes set in Cairo depict the capital as a modern city, with only light dustings of orientalist tropes like rolled rugs and clucking chickens. An Egyptian billionaire (voiced by English Iranian Omid Djalili) is used as comedy fodder, but the jokes aren’t racist; he’s treated similarly to the film's white billionaire, both of whom get robbed by the film’s heroes (Wolf’s team) and anti-heroes (Kitty’s team). Meanwhile, the Mexican character Lucha Fan is defined by his ethnicity, but the character feels affectionately drawn and is voiced by Mexican filmmaker Jorge R. Gutiérrez.

Ultimately, The Bad Guys 2 has a diverse and authentic voice cast, but the visual color coding of heroes versus villains sends some unfortunate subliminal messages.

Bonus for Body Diversity: +0.25

As mentioned, I appreciate the film’s character designs that show a range of different bodies for female characters to occupy—not always a given. While Diane falls into the more clichéd, curvy hourglass figure (or as writer Phil Matarese puts it, she has “an absolute dumptruck ass”), it's relief that The Bad Guys 2 adds big and strong women (Commisioner, Pigtail), small and agile women (Ms. Tarantula), and those in between (Crow, Diane). Nor does the movie slip into any tiresome fat jokes.

This isn’t to say that humor related to people’s bodies is entirely off the table. One joke lands effortlessly: When the formerly squishy-fluffy-cute guinea pig Professor Marmalade (Richard Ayoade) shows up in prison appearing suddenly musclebound, saying he "got swole," the theater burst into laughter. It’s a great reminder that the funniest jokes never punch down.

Mediaversity Grade: B 3.83/5

The Bad Guys 2 gives a stellar blueprint for how a franchise can tweak older material to suit today’s audiences: Add new characters with inclusivity in mind (like Kitty’s all-female crew), empower your existing characters (like Diane), and sit back and enjoy the new depths of your follow-up movie. It doesn't quite nail the balance between its target audiences of kids and their parents—my 3-year-old was pretty bored—but it’s still a blast for teens and grown-ups who can follow the movie’s breakneck plotting and moral quandaries.

Like The Bad Guys 2? Try these other movies starring animal leads.

Grade: BLiAugust 5, 2025