The Bad Guys / *** (PG)

 

Featuring the voices of:

Wolf: Sam Rockwell

Snake: Marc Maron

Tarantula: Awkwafina

Shark: Craig Robinson

Piranha: Anthony Ramos

Professor Marmalade: Richard Ayoade

Diane Foxington: Zazie Beetz

Police Chief Misty Luggins: Alex Borstein

Tiffany Fluffit: Lilly Singh

Universal Pictures and DreamWorks Animation present a film directed by Pierre Perifel. Written by Etan Cohen and additional material by Yoni Brenner and Hilary Winston. Based on the books by Aaron Blabey. Running time: 100 min. Rated PG (for action and rude humor).

There’s this thing about acting. When you’re young, you want to play the hero, or more specifically the troubled hero. You want a challenge. You want to portray anguish. Even when you do want to play the “bad guy,” you want to play him from a perspective where he thinks he’s the good guy. But as you get older, and you’ve had your acting challenges. When you’ve challenged yourself and overcome those challenges. When you’ve pushed your skill and art to the edge. When you’ve hurt inside for a role. When you’ve done all that; well then, you just want to play the bad guy. You just want to chew some scenery and be bad. I suppose that’s kind of where the inspiration for a series of children’s books that focuses on the bad guys comes from.

Aaron Blabey started out as an actor. It wasn’t until much later in life that he found his calling as a children’s book writer with a project that was influenced by his own film favorites Reservoir Dogs and movies like Steven Soderbergh’s Ocean’s trilogy. That book series is The Bad Guys, which focuses on a group of criminal friends who struggle with their own desires to be good. He has yet to finish the twenty book series, but it provides him with all those acting desires; and the new Dreamworks Animation movie The Bad Guys is the culmination of those original acting dreams for Blabey.

The first feature from veteran animator Pierre Periful, The Bad Guys is essentially a buddy movie. We’re first introduced to Wolf and Snake, voiced respectively by Sam Rockwell and Marc Maron, having a birthday breakfast for Snake in a diner. Through genre appropriate narration by Wolf, we are invited into his criminal world. He introduces us to Sanke, the safecracker; Tarantula, the hacker; Shark, the unlikely master of disguise; and Piranha, the muscle. 

Wolf and Snake leave the diner, walk across the street and rob a bank. After the intros, the audience is treated to an extended chase sequence with cinematic stylization out of Edgar Wright’s Baby Driver. After evading the cops, the crew gets down to planning their next score. During the preparation for this heist, Wolf inadvertently saves the life of an old woman and comes out of it actually feeling good about doing good. The heist goes bad, however, and when the team is caught by the overzealous Police Chief Misty Mullins, Wolf hatches a plan to enter a second chance program run by Professor Marmalade to turn good. While he tells the team it’s just another con job to stay out of prison, Wolf secretly is beginning to enjoy acting good. Mayor Diane Foxington is skeptical of Wolf’s motives, but approves of the rehabilitation anyway.

The animation is spectacular. Perifel and his production designers use a 3-D animation that is highly stylized. Looking something between 3D painting and the sketch style of Blabey’s books, the animation sculpts much of the film’s outsider attitude. It also captures that California feeling of the golden sunny haze that embodies the movies of Michael Bay, Dominic Sena and John Woo. Yet the characters also have traditional 2D animation for the eyes, somehow blending perfectly with the Californian vibe and very original look of the rest of the images.

Ultimately, the story is about a rift in the friendship between Wolf and Snake, as Snake lives to be a criminal, while Wolf might be finding he likes the idea of being a good guy a little too much for Snake’s liking. This buddy story is not without its twists and turns, with a heist plot and a couple of misdirections that are sophisticated for a kids movie and could easily work for adult fare. Many of the characters aren’t exactly what they seem, and for however much these guys like being bad, there are deeper levels to who they are than the stereotypes they seem to embody at first. It’s really a great film for introducing kids to the multiple layers of drama that make for the best storytelling.

My youngest son recently finished a reading challenge where The Bad Guys books provided the majority of his reading hours. Ironically, the kids who reached their goals were then allowed to throw pies in the faces of their school’s Principal (his mother, btw) and Resource Officer. There’s nothing like throwing a pie in the face of your school’s police officer and your very own mother to make you feel like one of the bad guys.

The Bad Guys is currently playing exclusively in theaters.