Too fast, too furious: "The Bad Guys 2"

It's some feat that The Bad Guys 2 has remained on the UK Top Ten for three months, and even after a) the film became available for home viewing and b) the kids went back to school. Granted, the last theatrical screenings standing would have been weekend matinees - but clearly something about it has clicked with the mass audience, and the summer's dearth of options for younger cinemagoers can only have helped its cause. Perhaps folks have been drawn back by the sequel's gleaming toplayer of artistry, which has been expanded to embrace yet more anthropomorphised animals spitting pulpy dialogue (newcomers to the voicecast here include Danielle Brooks, Maria Bakalova, Natasha Lyonne and the Riyadh Comedy Festival's Omid Djalili) and now covers areas of this bizarro-world L.A. that the first movie overlooked: the storm drains and back alleys, the hills and the oilfields. Superficially, at least, this latest DreamWorks animation is operating at some level far above those dubbed half-term screenfillers rendered in what looks like toddlers' crayon. Once again, though, more seasoned onlookers can surely only notice how basic the underlying plot mechanisms are, assembled as they have been merely to flip the initial premise on its head.

First time round, the bad guys were forced to go good. Now these good guys, introduced seeking clerical work at the banks they once held up, have to reconnect with their inner badasses after being framed for crimes they didn't commit. Again, this yields the motion of a street-corner cup-and-ball game, designed to misdirect the eye while anywhere between £10 and £40, depending on local ticket prices and the size of your family, gets extracted from your back pocket. (I mean, c'mon, the Sam Rockwell-voiced Wolf even says "it's not about the action, it's about the distraction"; a vague Trumpiness is evident long before the villain-in-chief reveals their plan to suck up all the gold in the universe.) Bigger, faster setpieces ensue: a high-speed escape from Egypt in the prologue, a lucha libre bout ("who's ready for some violence?") scored to pounding Cardi B, a zero-gravity final reel that does for this franchise what Fast Nine did for its own. (To infinity and beyond, this time to make a quick buck.) There's a set-up for a third instalment, but this franchise remains neither especially good nor bad; it's just there, offering nothing really to cling to save a small handful of rapidly dissipating titters. It's amazing The Bad Guys 2 has stuck around in cinemas this long, given how fundamentally flimsy and frenetic it is: maybe folks are just going back to see what flew between their ears at the speed of light first time around.

The Bad Guys 2 is now playing in cinemas nationwide, and available to rent via Prime Video and YouTube.