In The Bad Guys 2 (Pierre Perifel, 2025), based on Aaron Blabey’s best-selling graphic novel series, DreamWorks Animation delivers more than a family-friendly movie; it presents, perhaps unintentionally, a parable of our times. After watching the movie with my nine-year-old, I am convinced that it is neither about crime in the conventional sense, nor redemption in the moralistic one. What plays out on screen is a condensed allegory of extractivism, a theft whose object is everything, whose ends are empty, and whose method is planetary devastation that results from the extractivist conduct of the billionaire class.

The snow leopard Kitty Kat and her accomplices (Doom and Pigtail) endeavor to steal all the gold on Earth by using MacGuffinite, a special, gold-attracting magnet installed on a space station orbiting the planet. To do so, Kitty Kat coerces the Bad Guys (Wolf and his friends) into helping steal the MOON‑X rocket owned by billionaire Mr. Moon, a thinly veiled Elon Musk parody. Although this purposeless theft is presented as an equivalent to the car theft by Wolf & Co. at the beginning of the film, also undertaken for no particular purpose, Kitty Kat’s planet-wide piracy is different. Its goal is accumulation—of power for the sake of more power. It has no inherent end. The gold, once seized, will orbit uselessly in space. In this sense, it is indistinguishable from MacGaffinite, itself a nod to Alfred Hitchcock—and Angus MacPhail before him—who coined and used the term MacGaffine to refer to an object, device, or event that is necessary to the plot and the motivation of the characters, but insignificant, unimportant, or irrelevant in itself. Cosmic theft valorizes a spectacle over and above any other rationale. And it causes irreparable damage beyond the merely unlawful alienation of property.

Accumulation is the crystallization of a violent impulse, one that seeks to render fluid life into stilled property. When that property is gold—perhaps the most mythologized substance in the history of human desire—the act takes on an almost theological dimension. In The Bad Guys 2, the villain’s pursuit of gold has little to do with greed in the vulgar sense. Rather, it is motivated by an ontological ambition: to possess that which resists time, that which does not rust, decay, or die. Gold becomes the icon of immortality and of being itself, concentrated in the hands (actually, the paws) of the very few. But it comes at a cost. That cost, the film suggests if only obliquely, is ecological.

Drawn up to the Earth’s orbit, objects made of gold leave behind massive ruins—of air, of buildings and people’s limbs, of social trust. Even in its animated form, we glimpse the outlines of slow violence accelerated: the shattered ecosystems, the polluted atmospheres, the broken laboring bodies required to make such wealth possible. The billionaire villain is no isolated figure of evil. He, or in this case she—Kitty Kat, is the distillation of an entire system of metaphysics translated into economy, one whose logic reduces all life to resources and all resources to capital.

In this light, the film’s “heist” is an allegory of extractivism. Kitty Kat and her fellow “Bad Girls” do not merely steal gold. They enact the founding and constantly repeated gesture of the colonial-capitalist worldview: to remove value from the world, concentrate it elsewhere (in the cosmic elsewhere, in this instance), and sever it from the webs of relation that once gave it meaning in the first place. Here, then, is a feature-length animation about the metaphysics of capitalist and colonial dispossession on a planetary scale.

A lot more could be said about the animalization of the main characters, mingling without raising any eyebrows with humans, such as the police commissioner Misty Luggins. Why they would ever want fast cars or unlimited amounts of gold is never clear. But their world in The Bad Guys 2 is ours, too. It is a world where billionaires “think” and steal on planetary and cosmic scales; they plan to mine asteroids, buy data rights, invest in time‑travel and immortality startups—not to feed or heal—but to own space, time, and possibility itself. MacGuffinite becomes a metaphor for crypto, which, enabling the colonization of outer space, serves as an efficient tool of extraction.

In the end, Kitty Kat is imprisoned. Her fellow Bad Girls—Pigtail and Doom—get community service. Wolf and the other Bad Guys go undercover for a secret agency. But the film fails to dismantle the underlying logic, according to which theft, extraction, and accumulation of planetary value for nothing is a legitimate claim to power. As it often happens in Hollywood, the film diagnoses the problem and depicts its implications with crystal clarity. But it does not dismantle the structures that make the problem catastrophic on a global scale.

What remains, then, is tension. The film has no vision of a utopia beyond accumulation, but it gestures toward rupture in moments of compassion (Snake, Pigtail, Doom). It doesn’t imagine a world, in which gold doesn’t have to be extracted, but outlines the disaster that ensues from extractivism on a global scale. Somewhat like Berthold Brecht, who asked rhetorically “What is the robbing of a bank compared to the founding one?” The Bad Guys 2 conveys that real badness isn’t petty crime—it’s trying to appropriate the world, having transformed it into human and non-human resources accumulated in the hands of the few and wasted.