100 min | PG | April 22, 2022 | Universal Pictures
Mr. Wolf and his crew of animal criminals are the world’s best thieves and the world’s most feared villains. Caught at last, they fake going straight to dodge prison. The con is that one of them might actually mean it.
Mr. Wolf leads a crew of animal criminals. There is a wolf, a snake, a tarantula, a shark, and a piranha. They are the world’s most wanted thieves and they enjoy the work. When a heist goes wrong, Mr. Wolf strikes a deal to fake their rehabilitation into good citizens. The film is a caper about whether a creature everyone fears as a villain can choose to be something else, and whether the choice is real or just another con.
Sam Rockwell voices Mr. Wolf with a con man’s loose charm that slowly cracks as the character starts to mean what he says. Marc Maron plays Mr. Snake as the crew’s sour pragmatist, all dry cynicism and resistance to the redemption plot. Awkwafina gives Ms. Tarantula a fast-talking hacker confidence and Craig Robinson plays Mr. Shark as a master of disguise who commits to absurd costumes with total sincerity. Richard Ayoade voices Professor Marmalade, a guinea pig philanthropist, with a smarmy sweetness that curdles on cue. Zazie Beetz plays Governor Diane Foxington with a knowing edge that keeps her one step ahead of Mr. Wolf.
Pierre Perifel directs his first feature and builds the look around a fusion of computer animation and hand-drawn graphic flatness. The character designs carry visible ink lines and the action stages itself like a comic strip in motion. Etan Cohen’s script runs on heist mechanics borrowed from Ocean’s Eleven and paces the reversals to keep the cons stacking. A car chase through the city moves with smear frames and hard cuts that owe their rhythm to Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. The score leans on funk and surf guitar to push the cool-criminal attitude.
The film knows exactly what it is and executes the assignment with style. It takes a thin moral lesson about judging people by their nature and dresses it in confident animation and genuine comic timing. The redemption arc lands because Rockwell and Maron sell the friendship underneath it. This is a slick, fast, well-built caper that entertains without pretending to be more than a heist with teeth.