Movie Review - The Bad Guys

 

It's felt like forever since I last saw a DreamWorks film. But here we are with their latest offering. Another one to be based on a book series and using animation styles similar to the likes of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, Zootropolis and The Mitchells VS The Machines. Yeah, we are in for a good time here and even though it's about bad guys, something tells me that this will probably go the same way as say Wreck-It Ralph and the Despicable Me films. Looks good and managed to get a preview screening of it before its release, so let's take a look:

So the world is one where humans and anthropomorphic animals co-exist. But this world is in fear of a criminal gang of animals who basically are out to steal things and be bad. But when a heist of theirs goes horribly wrong at an awards event, a hamster called Prof. Rupert Marmalade IV (voiced by Richard Ayoade) comes to their aid and convinces them to do good deeds. The leader of the group Mr. Wolf (voiced by Sam Rockwell) goes along with this idea in the hopes to redeem himself and succeed in stealing what his gang were supposed to steal in the first place. But may have a change of heart, all while being unaware of a new enemy that may emerge at any point.

The film is pretty good. Nothing special, but it's clear that DreamWorks wanted to capitalize on the success Sony Animation has had with their films by mimicking the expressive eyes that The Mitchells VS The Machines had and also elements of the other films I mentioned. And it works well. It's also got a great soundtrack, all the actors play their parts well and of course snakes, wolves, piranhas, sharks and spiders can be bad guys. It just works because they are always (well most of the time anyway) depicted as such. Not having read the books this film is based on, I may consider reading them now that I have seen the film. 9/10