Despite their redemption arc in The Bad Guys, the eponymous gang discover in THE BAD GUYS 2 (2025) that like so many real-world ex-cons, their felonious past makes them unemployable, which is leaving them broke. What’s the solution? Hey, if they capture the Phantom Badnit stealing items made of McGuffinite (“That name sounds made-up.”) that would prove they’re legit, right?
Of course it doesn’t work out like that. Wolf, Snake, Webs, Piranha and Shark end up blackmailed by the Bad Girls (though the movie doesn’t give the gang that name) into pulling one last job with them, stealing a space shuttle as the ultimate heist. Would it surprise you to know both sides are planning a double cross?
This works better as a sequel than I’d heard, though the continuity doesn’t quite sync with the Bad Guys Netflix series (the series shows Webs working with them in their pre-fame days; the movie has her signing on after they’re already big time). Clearly the producers are now in franchise mode so this ends with seeding for Bad Guys 3. I hope they can keep up the quality. “They’re escaping west in a hot-dog truck — probably all beef, possibly chorizo.”
I also caught the team’s Halloween special, Haunted Heist, in which they rob the haunted mansion of a legendary thief, never mind the supposed curse on his loot. This was stock holiday stuff, less effective than A Very Bad Christmas. “I’d never pose in chiaroscuro — it’s so tacky.”
TIME AND WATER (2026) is an Icelandic author’s documentary on his family life and how the glaciers his grandparents once scaled are now dying in the age of global warming, the small Ok Glacier already having Gone to Dust. Poetic, though the appeal, like many other documentaries, is primarily the Pretty Pictures. “The glacier is no longer in geologic time.”
FOUR AROUND THE WOMAN (1921) is the final film in that Early Years Fritz Lang set TYG got me for Christmas. As shady businessman Rudolfe Klein-Rogge works on some scheme, he also worries about his wife cheating on him. The woman’s former sweetheart would love it if that were true, but he too is entangled in the criminal skullduggery. At least I think that’s the case: I had trouble following the crime plot, possibly because Plushie was in loud barking mode (even with a silent film, that’s distracting). Still the mix of crime schemes and social decadence, with looks at high society and low, make this feel more like Lang’s later films than The Wandering Shadow or Harakiri did.“In this fateful hour, I have come to set you straight.”
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