The Incredibles 2 - Review Thread

Might be my favorite Pixar movie in a while.

I didn't say that the superhero genre doesn't still pump out fairly generic material, what I was saying is that the landscape has changed drastically since 2004, hence why I mentioned Batman Begins and the MCU hadn't even come out at that point.

Those movies might not be game changers narrative wise, but they certainly have a lot more up their sleeves than anything Incredibles 2 presented.  I liked the film, but its predictability and lack of sizable scope feels even more glaring after we've been subjected to as many superhero films as we have since the original's release. 

Great movie, as expected.  There were some weird Easter Eggs in there.  Judging by the credits, I missed a couple.  Some were obvious, but there were a couple that were hard to spot.  I caught the "Quest" name on one of the buildings being in the exact same font as Jonny Quest.  This occurrence is completely independent of the clip from said cartoon used in the film.  The sound effect the Incred-ibile made just before it went into the bay was taken straight from the Batmobile in Batman '66.

This might be my favorite superhero franchise.

The Incredibles 2(7/1/2018)

The Incredibles is certainly not the best Pixar movie but it’s almost certainly one of their most important ones. It’s the first movie where the studio was willing to work with human characters in earnest and it was also the movie where they started to expand their scope and aim their sights on slightly older audiences. That movie still resonates but it was released way back in 2004, which in the world of animated movies is kind of an eternity. That’s fourteen years, meaning that a kid who saw it in its original release at ten years old would be twenty-four now, and yet in this whole timespan Pixar never saw fit to make a sequel, which is odd given that it seemed more suited for one than a lot of the other movies they seemed to have no qualms about mining for additional installments. After all, the first film ended on something of a teaser for future installments and given the film’s debt to comic books, which are an inherently serialized medium made The Incredibles seem like perfect franchise material. Part of the delay might simply be the aversion that Pixar once had to unnecessary sequels, but that certainly hasn’t been part of their philosophy in a good ten years. It also might have simply been a matter of working around director Brad Bird’s schedule as he branched out into live action filmmaking with varying degrees of success. Really though I think a big part of why there was a delay is that the first movie benefited greatly from coming out before Hollywood was regularly making high quality superhero movies and they were waiting in vain for the superhero genre to die down a bit in Hollywood, but that clearly wasn’t happening anytime soon so they decided to finally give it ago with this year’s The Incredibles 2.

This sequel picks up almost instantly from where the original film left off, with the moleman-like supervillain The Underminer (John Ratzenberger) emerging from the ground and trying to rob a bank, leading The Incredibles along with Frozone (Samuel L Jackson) to launch an attack despite the laws against masked vigilantism still being on the books. While they do stop the attack the fight does leave a lot of the same collateral damage that got “supers” banned in the first place. However, one person is not outraged by this and that’s a billionaire named Winston Deavor (Bob Odenkirk) who has been a superhero enthusiast since the death of his father years ago. He calls Mr. Incredible (Craig T. Nelson) and Elastigirl (Holly Hunter) and offers to let them stay in one of his mansions if they work with him on a lobbying campaign to bring back costumed heroes. The catch, he wants this campaign to start slow and just have Elastigirl do the crime fighting at first given that he has less of a history of destructive fighting. That means Mr. Incredible is the one tasked with staying home and watching Violet (Sarah Vowell), Dash (Huck Milner), and baby Jack-Jack (Eli Fucile) whose powers are just starting to come into full bloom. Mr. Incredible says he’s game to do this, but in reality he kind of resents this turn of events and doesn’t really know how to cope with the domestic life. Of course he is self-aware enough not to complain about this to Elastigirl, who finds she has her hands full when a mysterious villain called The Screenslaver emerges and begins wrecking-havoc.

Ever since the release of the original The Incredibles people have been debating whether the message as its center about what society owes to the exceptional people among them ultimately boils down to a sort of junior version of Randian Objectivism. This sequel doesn’t exactly continue down that path but it doesn’t exactly shy away from material that could be viewed as political. For instance there’s a story the Bob Odenkirk character tells at one point about someone who’s killed by an intruder as he calls for a superhero instead of dealing with the problem himself, which is disturbingly similar to the NRA propaganda about the dangers of relying on police instead of personal gun ownership. On the other side of the spectrum there’s some talk about the “supers” in the family having to hide their true selves, which could be seen as something of an allegory for gay or trans identity. But the plotline that most overtly and extensively deals with ongoing modern debates is the Mr. Incredible’s ennui at the process of being a sort of stay at home dad while his wife wears the pants… I mean costume… and Elastigirl’s own anxiety about trying to “have it all” instead of maintaining more of a work/life balance. This is a storyline that I suspect will annoy people who sit on both sides of the feminist divide. On one hand the movie certainly ultimately falls on the side of Elastigirl being perfectly capable of pursuing a career on her own and of not guilting her for her decision to do so, but on the other hand it feels kind of lame and regressive that we’re still doing the whole Mr. Mom thing in 2018 and the fact that Mr. Incredible proves to be this incompetent at keeping a house in order without the help of a woman does kind of reinforce the gender norm at play.

Messaging aside, the way the film splits into a separate A story with Elastigirl tracking down the Screen Slaver and a B story with Mr. Incredible holding things down at home does lead to a bit of a clumsy and slightly TVish story structure for a lot of its runtime before things merge later on. What’s more each of these stories have their weakness. The Elastigirl story doesn’t have anything jarringly poor in it but it also feels a bit routine as far as these things go. The mystery about who the screenslaver is isn’t terribly compelling and the film doesn’t really do as much with the idea of a superhero going on a PR campaign as it could. The Mr. Incredible story by contrast feels a lot more unique in that you don’t exactly see every day but it did draw attention to one of the series bigger weaknesses: the Incredibles kids are not very well drawn out. Violet is a pretty cliché over-dramatic teenage girl and Dash is even more thinly drawn and doesn’t do much in the film besides get overly excited about stuff. He’s frankly kind of annoying. The movie also has slightly more clumsy animation than I was expecting from a new Pixar movie, possibly because the art style they devised back in 2004 was designed to work around the limitations of the technology of the time but which may be more of a stifling force today.

I’ve complained a lot but the movie is actually a lot better than I’ve probably let on. In fact I enjoyed it quite a bit while I was actually watching it and it’s more when I look back on it that if feels a bit more flawed and insubstantial. What probably saves it are its action set-pieces and its sense of humor. It’s no secret that in terms of powers and to some extent the overall concept The Incredibles are basically a ripoff of The Fantastic Four and it uses this set of powers a lot more creatively than any of the real adaptations of that property ever have and the animation medium makes all the fights seem a lot more loose and fun than a lot of the action scenes in “real” superhero movies do even if they don’t have quite the same sense of spectacle that you get from seeing these powers in more realistic settings. The film also has a generally amusing tone and some of the comic elements like Edna Mode remain strong. Watched with tempered expectations the film is quite fun but the fact that it’s a movie fourteen years in the making kind of makes you expect a bit more than the film is really able to deliver on. It certainly isn’t going to have the impact of the original movie but I suspect it will leave most audiences satisfied enough.

*** out of Five

The short at the beginning is certainly more disturbing than anything in any Jurassic Park movie.

It made me hungry, that's for damn sure.

Really? I thought it was a very interesting way to delve into a mother losing her son, only for him to later come to realize family is the most important thing and return home to rekindle his relationship with his mother.

Had a lot more to it than Incredibles 2 did, that's for sure.

Ha, well that's fair, I really liked the short but it was certainly out there.