The Bad Guys 2 review – gang of cuddly animal criminals get pulled back in for one last heist

Snappier, funnier and more relaxed than the first film, this caper sees the crew dragged back to villainy by a ‘MacGuffinite’ plot Here’s one of the few animated kids’ sequels you can approach without strapping into a hazmat suit for protection. DreamWorks’s franchise hits its stride with this minor upgrade – a snappier, funnier and more relaxed movie than the original. It begins like a Bond or Bourne with a death-defying car chase around Cairo after the gang of criminal predators pull off yet another a splashy heist. Behind the wheel of the getaway car is ringleader Mr Wolf (voiced by Sam Rockwell, and doing such a decent Clooney impersonation that George should shake him down for royalties). Actually, the chase is a flashback to five years ago. Right now, in the present, Mr Wolf, Mr Snake, Mr Shark and the gang have gone straight. But their fresh start as good guys is scuppered by a snow leopard and a frame-up for a series of daring heists involving a precious metal called MacGuffi...

Can Zack Snyder’s Rebel Moon prove there’s life beyond Star Wars for the space opera genre?

Snyder’s epic-looking Netflix effort comes complete with lightsabers and exotic space princesses. Can it revive a neglected style of film-making?

For a genre that pretty much inspired the entire blockbuster era, space opera has become weirdly hard to get hold of beyond Star Wars. After the original trilogy’s barnstorming success in the late 70s for Lucasfilm, there were umpteen abortive attempts by other studios to grab themselves some of that good space fantasy dollar, but nobody really got anywhere useful. Disney’s appalling The Black Hole is barely remembered these days, while Roger Corman’s Battle Beyond the Stars is perhaps memorable only for giving a certain James Cameron an early break on special effects. There was even a James-Bond-in-space movie, Roger Moore’s Moonraker, although it hardly registers as one of 007’s most scintillating adventures.

Flash forward to the present day, and space opera seems to have become the preserve of the small screen, thanks to Disney+’s endlessly satisfying conveyor belt of Star Wars spin-offs and retreads. We are promised more movies set in a galaxy far, far away, but there are no definitive start dates for production and certainly no mooted release dates. Ever since 2019’s incredibly disappointing, trilogy-killing The Rise of Skywalker, the only way to watch space opera at the multiplex has been to catch the latest Guardians of the Galaxy episode or sign up for retro screenings of the old classics.

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