On demand: "The Bad Guys"

There's a conceptual joke underpinning DreamWorks' 2022 digimation The Bad Guys that nudges it one step beyond Disney's similar Zootropolis. In a L.A. where humans and animals exist side-by-side, the appearance of ambulant, talking sharks, spiders and piranhas sparks as much alarm as it would in our world. So these societal outcasts have bonded together and committed themselves to a criminal cause: the opening scene, a U-rated riff on all things Tarantino, has ringleader Wolf (voice of Sam Rockwell, styled after George Raft) and slithering sidekick Snake (Marc Maron) chewing the fat in a diner before robbing the bank across the road. Thereafter, The Bad Guys keeps reconfiguring itself along the lines of various types of crime picture: first a heist movie rendered in pixels, an Ocean's 8-bit during which Wolf's charm offensive is explicitly described as "the full Clooney", later a prison break drama, at every turn seeking where possible to swerve the firm moral instruction even the generally entertaining Zootropolis succumbed to at points. Everything here is far too topsy-turvy for that. The real villain isn't any of the Bad Guys themselves, depicted as Robin Hood types, prone to bouts of conscience about the paths they're on, but the nefarious Professor Marmalade (Richard Ayoade), a two-faced guinea pig introduced as the recipient of a humanitarian prize, but who is later unmasked as having recruited our anti-heroes to do the worst of his dirty work for him. This is yet another spot of chicanery, and The Bad Guys proves beholden to that manic kids-pic motion that trails decent gags in its wake - an e-Captcha for spiders ("I'm not a tarantula"), the sight of the Wolf in an ovine sleepsuit (sheep's clothing, geddit) - but almost always causes one of these things to pass through the eyeballs and out the ears at top speed; keeping matters light and staying mobile ensures it never remotely gathers the depth or weight of, say, one of those comparable Miller/Lord contraptions (Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, The Mitchells vs. the Machines). Worse, it accelerates straight past its best comic ideas (Prof. Marmalade's efforts to raise an army of guinea pigs - pfft, gone in a flash) and never allows us to savour the artistry of its pleasing magic-hour design. Nothing is allowed to stick: it's all a smash-and-grab. As it morphs once more, this time into a superhero-type affair, and cues up the Chemical Brothers' no less hyper "Go", you can feel yourself being prodded towards the door of Screen Five to make way for the next crowd of suckers - and I was sat watching it on my sofa at home.

The Bad Guys is available to stream via ITVX and to rent via Prime Video, and on DVD via Universal; a sequel, The Bad Guys 2, is currently in cinemas nationwide.