“The Bad Guys 2” is a benignly rambunctious cartoon about a quintet of critters — the debonair Mr. Wolf (Sam Rockwell), the goofy/badass Mr. Snake (Marc Maron), the flatulent Mr. Piranha (Anthony Ramos), the disguise expert Mr. Shark (Craig Robinson), and the brainiac Ms. Tarantula (Awkwafina) — who are famous for being bad guys (they’re known as “the Bad Guys”), but when you come right down to it they’re actually pretty good guys. They’re like any movie team with a special freak quality, from the “Guardians of the Galaxy” brigade to the escaped zoo animals of “Madagascar.” They’re bad guys the way that Gru, from the “Despicable Me” films, is a “bad guy” — a notorious troublemaker who’s really just trying, on his own terms, to do right.
In the three years since the first “Bad Guys” (a major animated hit during the pandemic), our team of rascal antiheroes have gone to prison and gone straight, and they’re now officially good guys, which can make the first half of the movie seem overwhelmingly sweet and harmless. Sam Rockwell, who voices the fast-talking, white-suited Mr. Wolf, injects his flaky-saint personality right into the character, so that despite Wolf’s yellow eyes and gleaming teeth (he’s supposed to be a Big Bad Wolf), what you hear in every line is how friendly and relatable he is. This dude is a criminal ringleader? Only in an adventure aimed at the younger end of the spectrum of the animation demo.
Yet if you let yourself get on that wavelength of frisky innocence, “The Bad Guys 2” exerts a wholesome and slightly mischievous appeal. The movie does have a real villain, and you feel the regal bite of her nastiness — she’s a thief known as the Phantom Bandit, who is soon unmasked as Kitty Kat (Danielle Brooks), a snow leopard who leads a trio known as the Bad Girls (they include Maria Bakalova as Pigtail Petrova, a wild boar with a nose ring and a terrifically literal-minded Russian sense of things). They hijack the Moon X rocket ship and take it into space, launching a master plan of thievery built around triggering the world’s most powerful magnet.
It’s not until halfway through the movie that the rocket ship blasts off, at which point our heroes attempt to board the ship by flying next to it…on a helicopter. They leap aboard the surface of the speeding rocket, even as it’s casting off stages. I confess that this sequence stunned me, because up until then I thought “The Bad Guys 2” was mild and cutely comic and not much more, and suddenly we’re watching animated characters act as if they’re in the middle of their own Tom Cruise stunt.
It’s all part of the fancifully elegant and logistically exacting world created by the film’s French director, Pierre Perifel (co-directing this time with JP Sans, head of character animation on the first “Bad Guys”), who based these movies on the junior graphic-novel series by the Australian author Aaron Blabey. “The Bad Guys 2” turns into an outer-space action movie, and that’s where it really comes alive. Not that there aren’t a few high quirks and personality chuckles along the way. Marc Maron, once again, voices the gravelly trickster Mr. Snake, who has tried to reinvent himself as a yoga-and-kombucha health fanatic; he now exits every situation with a California “Bye-eeeee,” which made me grin each time. In that outer-space sequence, Mr. Pirahna’s flatulence gets out of control, fueling prospects of an anti-gravity death Stanley Kubrick never dreamed of. And throughout the movie, Mr. Wolf’s connection to Diane (Zazie Beetz), a red fox who happens to be the state governor (and, unbeknownst to everyone, a former criminal herself), results in the rare animated romance with some actual chemistry.
As a children’s comedy, “The Bad Guys 2” is more affectionate than ha-ha funny. But it ties into a trend in animation that I feel is just beginning to take off. The most notable aspect of “Smurfs” is that it unfolds in a multiverse and engages some of the tropes of superhero movies. And in just one sequel, the title characters of “The Bad Guys 2” have gone from being kiddified ruffians to a team of saviors protecting the planet. The climactic sequence has James Bond/comic-book DNA, as our heroes swirl around in space and Kitty Kat’s ultra-magnet attracts all the gold objects from earth below. It’s a visually super-cool gambit, and it sets the “Bad Guys” franchise onto a grand new plane of spectacle. By the end, the movie hasn’t just set up another sequel in the standard they’re-coming-back way. It has reconfigured our heroes’ identities, enmeshing even characters this child-friendly in the gears of adult entertainment.