A secret-in-the-basement plot that is almost wafer-thin. Four magnetic leads and a fifth little charmer who barely talks. I guess Villains banks a little too much on its leads to keep things engaging. Sure, Bill Skarsgård, Maika Monroe, Jeffrey Donovan, and Kyra Sedgwick are all excellent but some extra character-texture would have helped. The writers do not give the antagonists-turned-protagonists enough context to believe that one of them is good at lock-picking but is dumb enough to forget the fuel levels in their escape-car or can't hotwire one. That is conveniently treated as humour instead. Also, a change-of-heart scenario isn't fleshed out well enough.
I'd have to say that the first couple of acts in Villains are incredibly better than the rest of the film, primarily owing to better-written gags. The cleverly titled film discusses the moral dilemma of bad-guys-turning-good (and vice versa) by making two extremely different couples tread that thin line separating right and wrong. Skarsgård and Monroe play a modern, quirkier, sillier version of Bonnie & Clyde while Donovan and Sedgwick enact a deadly boomer-couple - they play off of each other well. The horror in Villains is more or less restricted to some gore but it's the dark humour that mostly works.
