The Bad Guys (Perifel, 2022)

Hey all…spoilers, I guess…that is, if you can profess with a straight face to not knowing exactly what is going to happen in this movie from the opening scene onward…

Any decent marketing executive could, I am quite certain, provide me with mountains of evidence that audiences do not in fact want anything new or innovative in their art. Give us the familiar and the formulaic. Put a new face on it if it’s a portrait, alter the tempo or the bridge if its a song, and reuse, renew, recycle.

The Bad Guys is low-hanging fruit from the tree of Despicable Boss Mega Baby Gru Mind, and its generic nature would not be a knock against it were its execution anything memorable. As it is constituted, the audience knows what it is in for and can hardly blame anyone else if that is all it gets.

Is there something wrong with me that I find the absence of any actual (rather than rhetorical) difference between good guys and bad guys (and gals) to be a depressing commentary on the amoral environment we live in? The chief bad guy (who enters the movie being hailed as a good guy with a cult-like following) brainwashes his followers to look like him and act on his bidding alone, caring not for the betterment of society but only to enrich himself.

Faced with such evil, what sort of moral puritan would insist on pointing out that the good guys leave a large trail of broken laws in their wake and actually frame the bad guy for the one crime he didn’t do? Or that the politician is actually a two-faced criminal who uses her position of public trust to cultivate a positive reputation while revealing her true, criminal self only when she dons a disguise.

I say “true self,” but, of course, the weakness of this whole genre is that the “true” self is never really evil. The bad guys play-act at being bad, but there is never any question which way their moral compass will point when the chips are all-in. (Yeah, I know, I could say the same thing about Ambulance.)

The insistence that good and bad are merely masks we put on and take off is pretty much the antithesis of the message of most great art from Hawthorne to Vonnegut to The Sopranos, that we cannot pretend to be something for any sustained period of time without actually conforming to the image that we are trying to project.

But, hey, this is a kid’s movie, and aren’t kids the least likely to be swayed by repeated cultural messages that it isn’t breaking laws that makes you “bad” just…um…being on the wrong team and having the wrong friends.

By the way, there is a cross-dressing shark who pretends to be pregnant. Don’t think he uses the girls’ bathroom or anything, but he totally could have because nobody catches on that he’s a dude, so I guess that’s Hollywood admitting that Florida is on to something, maybe?

Oh, and fart jokes. Just the other day, I was thinking about why movie ticket sales were down, and I was thinking, it has been so very long since I’ve heard a good fart joke…