BEFORE: OK, so the Springsteen film was a "big" film, and then "Sword of Trust" was kind of a little dud. So tonight's film needs to be big, right? Look, I'm not saying "Sword of Trust" was burned toast, not exactly, but it wasn't great. Now I have to move on and try to figure out if there was a purpose to burning the toast, if that's what I did. I think Springsteen would approve of the concept, as he sang in "Hungry Heart" - "Like a river that don't know where it's going, I took a wrong turn and I just kept going." That's a songwriter who burned a lot of toast, if you know what I mean - anyway, I'm going to keep going, the chain is still active even if the films aren't all bangers.
Marc Maron carries over again from "Sword of Trust". Maron's third film of the year is also Craig Robinson's and Omid Djalili's third film this year, so they'll all make the year-end countdown, and Paul Walter Hauser, who may come back for a fourth film if I can swing it, qualified by appearing in "Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere". Nobody's close to de-throning Jason Statham, though, I'm fine with that, the man works very hard.
FOLLOW-UP TO: "The Bad Guys" (Movie #4,166)
THE PLOT: The Bad Guys are struggling to find trust and acceptance in their newly minted lived as Good Guys, when they are pulled out of retirement and forced to do "one last job" by an all-female squad of criminals.
AFTER: They can make four or five of ten of these "Bad Guys" films, as far as I'm concerned, I know there could be franchise burn-out at some point, as with the "Ice Age" and "Shrek" and "Toy Story" movies, but at least with "Toy Story" they make a point of adding a bunch of new characters for each sequel, and that's the path that "Bad Guys" is on, so OK, by all means, let's make more. I've got "Zootopia 2" on the books and coming up in May, that will kind of be the pivot film that pushes us in the direction of Mothers Day, if that makes sense. Look, I'll admit some of the May films, I'm not sure yet HOW I'm going to watch them, but if necessary I can drop the ones that aren't streaming and I've got a way to fill in the gap with 2, 4 or 6 movies if necessary.
But let's deal with "Bad Guys 2" first, what great timing to have a bunch of characters stealing a rocket ship and going to space, since we just all watched the first moon mission in a long time take place. Sure, this movie came out in July 2025, and the filmmakers probably weren't thinking that far ahead, but I watched it now, post-Artemis, so to me, the timing is spot on. The scheme is that somebody is collecting this rare metal that when electrified, can act as a magnet for gold, so with the rocket in orbit, the gang can steal all of the world's gold at once, and this probably seems like a genius idea IF you are a kid, the kind of kid who wants to take over the world someday. OK, but I've got a couple of NITPICK POINTS here. If you're going to steal gold, which is on the Earth, held down by gravity, does it make sense to go into orbit to steal the gold? I mean, if you want to rob money, you go to the bank, where the money is. Why go to space, where the gold is NOT, in order to steal it? Even if you had a magnet that was powerful enough to draw gold from earth to the space station, how far is that, and how much time would it take? It takes hours for a rocket to get to orbit, but it's traveling fast, like, umm, like a rocket. Loose gold would not be rocket-powered, so even if you could exert enough magnetic force on it to counter Earth's gravity, it's going to take a lot of TIME to travel up to space station. Of course, this is a movie, so it takes only a few seconds for the gold to roll in, which is misleading and impossible.
I don't want to say too much about how the film ends, but there are a few fake-outs and our heroes don't end up with the gold, but who does? According to the film's Wikipedia page, once the magnet is destroyed, the gold is "returned", but would it be? Once something's in orbit around the Earth, doesn't it kind of stay there, assuming it's at the point of balance where its high-speed momentum is countered by the constant downward pull of gravity. In other words, a satellite or space station is in a constant state of "falling", however it's moving forward fast enough that it doesn't fall to earth, the earth is round (I swear) so the Earth kind of moves out from under it as it goes by, therefore a constant (more or less) distance from the planet is maintained. Like imagine throwing a baseball, it falls to earth in a matter of feet, while a cannonball can maybe go a few miles before gravity pulls it down, but a space shuttle or a rocket can travel fast enough that it stays in orbit and won't fall down until you change its course.
Anyway, even if that gold all DID fall to Earth, it would probably be extremely dangerous, the heat of re-entry might even melt it, so yeah, hot liquid gold falling from the sky, what could possibly go wrong there? Plus nobody would get their own gold back, because what are the odds, if you're lucky enough to have hot molten gold fall on you, it would probably be somebody else's, like who has the time to sift through thousands of pieces of gold and figure out who should get which ones back? Umm, yeah, I lost three candelabras and four gold bars in that heist from orbit, so please put me down to get an equal amount of gold back, OK? I'm sure whoever finds that much gold will turn it in - like there's a guy who comes into the theater every few weeks and reports that he lost $50 at a screening, just in case we find some money after cleaning the theater, I guess.
Anyway, a lot of the other things in this film are rather complicated and unbelievable, more so than your average cartoon, maybe, but so what? It's an animated film so you can make whatever impossible thing you want happen. Remember in "Despicable Me" when Gru stole the moon? Yeah, it's kind of like that - swing for the fences, because why not? If you can think it then somebody can draw it or make a computer pixellate it, there really should be no limits in the storytelling. It should be fun at some point to see what unhinged things A.I. software starts coming up with when they fire all the writers in Hollywood and turn the whole process of making kiddie films over to computer-generated stories. Yeah, there were more layoffs at Disney/Marvel this week, so that's what's happening, human input will soon no longer be required.
The overarching storyline is that the Bad Guys reformed at the end of the previous film, Wolf got into a situationship with the Governor, who was a secret high-tech thief herself, maybe having stolen the election or something. They're hurting for money, however, because Wolf can't get hired at the banks he robbed and Tarantula has a huge gap in her resumé where she was doing crime stuff. When a series of crimes are committed by the Phantom Bandit, the public assumes that the Bad Guys are behind them, so Wolf offers his team's services to the Commissioner, if they can deduce the identity of the Phantom Bandit, they can put "police consultant" on their job record and maybe that will lead to something. What could possibly go wrong?
The clues seem to point to Snake, the one member of the Bad Guys who didn't help solve the recent crimes and who has been very happy lately, for some reason. He's even planning to attend the wrestling event which has been determined to be the site of the next heist, as the championship belt is made for that same mystery metal, MacGuffinite (the name is an inside joke for film fans, sure). But even though the Phantom Bandit was there disguised as a wrestler, the crowd only saw the Bad Guys running off with the belt. They're rescued by Snake's new girlfriend driving a getaway van, but it's all a dodge to get the old Bad Guys working with a new team of female criminals, led by a snow leopard.
Kitty Kat has footage of Diane Foxington, the governor, doing crimes as the Crimson Paw, so she uses that to blackmail the Bad Guys to help steal the rocket, if they don't, she'll upload the footage to the dreaded internet and that would end Diane's political career. Umm, somebody didn't get the memo, politicians can do crimes now as long as they don't get caught, or even if they do, they can just threaten to sue the press for slander and they'll probably win so who even cares any more if our government is completely corrupt? Oh, right, this is for kids so maybe we can wait a few more years before we shatter their dreams of a fair and just political system in America.
Somehow, the Bad Guys catch up with the launched rocket by using a helicopter (NITPICK POINT #2, that's got to be impossible) and everybody ends up in space for the final heist of the Earth's gold, as I mentioned before. Meanwhile Professor Marmalade (who was imprisoned, but then met with Diane in a sort-of parody of "Silence of the Lambs" where they played Connect Four) got his crimes acquitted, I guess because he gave up Kitty Kat, only he had the bad luck to step inside his gold limousine just before all the gold on the planet got sucked in to orbit. Hey, I just thought of NITPICK POINT #3, you could really only steal the gold from half of Earth at one time, again because the Earth is round and even though the space station completes an orbit every 90 minutes, it's only 250 miles high, so it can only see part of the earth (much less than half) at any given time.
Well, apart from giving kids some very wrong information about how rockets and space stations work, this was a pretty entertaining film. Since it's set in a fantasy world where perhaps different rules apply, and there are humans interacting with talking animals and that doesn't really weird to anybody, we may have to let a few things go and perhaps grade on a curve. Apparently this film was going to be released in spring of 2026, but then production was rushed to get out ahead of "Zootopia 2", so yeah, maybe they cut a few corners here and there.
Directed by Pierre Perifel (director of "The Bad Guys") and JP Sans
Also starring the voices of Sam Rockwell (last heard in "IF"), Craig Robinson (last seen in "Daddy's Little Girls"), Awkwafina (last seen in "Renfield"), Anthony Ramos (last seen in "A House of Dynamite"), Zazie Beetz (last seen in "Joker: Folie a Deux"), Danielle Brooks (last seen in "A Minecraft Movie"), Natasha Lyonne (last seen in "The Fantastic Four: First Steps"), Maria Bakalova (last seen in "The Apprentice"), Alex Borstein (last seen in "Love the Coopers"), Richard Ayoade (last seen in "The Phoenician Scheme"), Lilly Singh (last heard in "The Bad Guys"), Omid Djalili (last seen in "Love Again"), Colin Jost (last seen in "Fly Me to the Moon"), Jaime Camil (last heard in "Hotel Transylvania 3: Summer Vacation"), Hugo Savinovich, Michael Godere (also last heard in "The Bad Guys"), Kelly Stables (last seen in "The Ring Two"), William Calvert (last heard in "Haunted Mansion"), Arthur Ortiz, Jason Griffith, Shelby Young (last heard in "Ghostbusters: Afterlife"), Bridget Hoffman, Christopher Knights (last heard in "Kung Fu Panda 4"), Ashley Lambert, Jorge R. Gutierrez (last heard in "The Book of Life"), Ashley London, Juan Pacheco, David Michie, R.B. Ripley,
RATING: 7 out of 10 tranquilizer darts
No comments:
Post a Comment