The Bad Guys 2
The original Bad Guys was a pleasant surprise: a DreamWorks animated film that used French New Wave aesthetics and a genuinely clever premise to deliver one of the more entertaining family films of 2022. The sequel is more of the same with one significant caveat.
Full analysis below
NOT A WOKE TRAP. The Bad Guys 2 introduces an all-female villain squad called the Bad Girls as its central antagonist group, which is visible early in the film. This is a prominent woke element but it is upfront rather than hidden. The film's traditional core - loyalty, personal honor, and good defeating genuine evil - is also on display from the beginning. Families who enjoyed the first film will find the sequel more ideologically loaded, but it is not a bait-and-switch. The progressive elements are visible; whether they outweigh the traditional ones depends on what you weight most.
The original Bad Guys was a pleasant surprise: a DreamWorks animated film that used French New Wave aesthetics and a genuinely clever premise to deliver one of the more entertaining family films of 2022. The sequel is more of the same with one significant caveat.
The Bad Guys 2 picks up where the first film ended. The reformed criminal gang led by Mr. Wolf is struggling to reintegrate into society. Wolf is falling for Diane Foxington, the governor. Snake has found a girlfriend. Piranha, Shark, and Tarantula can't get jobs. Into this already unstable equilibrium arrives Kitty Kat, an all-female criminal mastermind voiced by Danielle Brooks, who leads a collective called the Bad Girls and has a scheme to steal all the world's gold using a magnetized space station.
The film is funny. Sam Rockwell and Marc Maron remain genuinely excellent voice actors who make their characters feel more lived-in than most animated films manage. Daniel Pemberton's score is stylish. Pierre Perifel and co-director JP Sans have maintained the first film's visual identity - the angular character designs, the saturated color palette, the kinetic action sequences that owe more to Luc Besson than to Pixar.
But the Bad Girls are a problem. Kitty Kat and her crew are framed with the full girl-power aesthetic vocabulary: a femme fatale leader, a loyal lieutenant with a personality redemption arc, their collective identity presented as an inverted mirror of the Bad Guys. The film eventually defeats them, which is the correct narrative choice, but the amount of screen time devoted to making them look cool is a tell. The film wants conservative parents to know it has female villains, not just male ones. Conservative parents will notice what the film is doing.
The traditional core holds. Wolf's loyalty to his team is the film's real emotional engine. Snake's arc, which involves a girlfriend who turns out to be a double agent, delivers one of the more emotionally effective beats in the film when the team rallies around him. The Bad Guys stay bad in the sense of rejecting polite society but consistently choose goodness when it costs them something. Good guys win.
For families who want a clean, funny, animated film that is not actively hostile to their values, this is acceptable territory. The girl-power villain squad pushes it toward the woke column more than the first film did. But the franchise's bones are traditional enough that the sequel cannot fully betray them.
Formula: Weighted Score = Severity × Authenticity Multiplier × Centrality Multiplier
🔴 Woke Tropes
| Trope | Severity | Authenticity | Centrality | Score |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| All-Female Villain Collective (Girl Boss Antagonists) | 3 | High | High | 3.78 |
| Diverse Ensemble Cast (DEI Casting) | 1 | High | Low | 0.35 |
| Villain Rehabilitation (Partial, Sympathetic Underlings) | 2 | High | Moderate | 1.4 |
| Governor as Female Romantic Lead | 2 | High | Moderate | 1.4 |
| TOTAL WOKE | 6.9 | |||
🟢 Traditional Tropes
| Trope | Severity | Authenticity | Centrality | Score |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Heroism as Consistent Action and Character | 4 | High | High | 5.04 |
| Personal Responsibility and Genuine Evil | 3 | High | Moderate | 2.1 |
| Brotherhood and Loyalty Tested by Betrayal | 4 | High | High | 5.04 |
| Good Wins, Order Restored | 3 | High | Moderate | 2.1 |
| Wolf Chooses Honor Over Personal Gain | 3 | High | Moderate | 2.1 |
| TOTAL TRADITIONAL | 16.4 | |||
Score Margin: +9 TRAD
Director: Pierre Perifel
MODERATE WOKE. Perifel is a French animator who came up through DreamWorks on How to Train Your Dragon and Madagascar. The first Bad Guys film showed ideological restraint for a 2022 animated film. The sequel leans harder into the girl-power villain dynamic, which likely reflects studio notes rather than personal ideology. Perifel's instincts lean toward visual style and character comedy over messaging.Pierre Perifel made his directorial debut with The Bad Guys (2022), which used French New Wave aesthetics and a stylized comic-book visual language to distinguish itself from standard DreamWorks fare. That first film surprised audiences with its relatively restrained approach to identity politics. The sequel inherits the visual style and character chemistry but introduces a female villain collective that is coded in contemporary girl-power terms. Perifel co-directed with JP Sans, whose background in character animation kept the sequel visually consistent with its predecessor. The result is a better-looking film than most animated sequels with a slightly more ideologically active screenplay.
Writer: Yoni Brenner & Etan Cohen
Yoni Brenner and Etan Cohen share screenplay credit on the sequel. Cohen has a long Hollywood career that includes Tropic Thunder (2008) and Get Hard (2015), films that engaged with race and identity in ways that were more comedic than ideological. The Bad Guys 2 script is funnier than expected for an animated sequel, with the Bad Girls functioning as genuine threats rather than progressive props. The plot does not resolve by validating the all-female villain squad - Kitty Kat is unambiguously defeated and her scheme is the bad guy's scheme. The writing is cleaner than a lot of contemporary animated film scripts, though it carries the expected DreamWorks house style of rapid-fire pop culture jokes.
Producers
- Damon Ross (DreamWorks Animation)
- Aaron Blabey (Source Material)
Full Cast
Adult Viewer Insight
The Bad Guys 2 is a sequel that adds ideological freight to a franchise that earned its first film's goodwill by keeping the messaging light. The introduction of the Bad Girls as a central antagonist group is the studio's most visible leftward move, and parents who noticed the first film's relatively clean values picture should approach the sequel with adjusted expectations. The good news is that the traditional elements - loyalty, honor, genuine friendship tested by betrayal - survive intact. The bad news is that DreamWorks clearly wanted to insert a girl-power counter-narrative and did so regardless of whether the story needed it.
Parental Guidance
Rated PG. 104 minutes. Animated action violence throughout: characters are tranquilized, punched, and caught in explosions. Professor Marmalade returns briefly. A space station sequence features significant spectacle violence. No language concerns. No sexual content beyond Wolf and Diane's romantic tension, which is handled with complete PG appropriateness. Snake's relationship with Susan, which turns out to be a betrayal, is handled carefully enough that young children will not find it distressing. The film's emotional beats around friendship and loyalty are age-appropriate. Recommended for ages 7 and up. The 104-minute runtime is manageable. No nightmare-fuel imagery.
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