………….Sigh.
No, I didn’t dislike The Incredibles 2. The Incredibles 2 is a good film with beautiful animation, solid voice acting, and is a fun superhero film for all ages.
But man, is it a disappointing sequel!
What I’ve just written may seem like an oxymoron. How can a film be good yet also be disappointing? When viewed on its own individual merits, The Incredibles 2 is a well-made film. There are issues—notable issues I will discuss below—but enough positive material to surpass its flaws and be a film worth viewing. And yet, The Incredibles 2 is not just its own individual film. It is a sequel to an amazing Pixar film that flips the superhero genre on its head with brilliant deconstructive storytelling and effective utilization of superheroes as a commentary on suburban lifestyle/families. The Incredibles is also a great, straightforward superhero film with engaging, creative action sequences, thrilling missions, fluent pacing, memorable characters, a fantastic villain, and a beautiful aesthetic tribute to the golden age of superheroes. The Incredibles is the only Pixar film I have ever felt truly needed a sequel—a sequel I’ve been waiting for, desiring for nearly fourteen flipping years. And after all that time, here finally comes the sequel to one of Pixar’s best creations…and it’s just decent. Not amazing, not great, not very good, not even notably good—just your average, three-out-of-four stars superhero blockbuster.
Yet the sequel doesn’t start off this way, it actually begins quite promisingly. Starting directly after The Incredibles final shot, The Incredibles 2 opens with its titled family—father Bob Parr/Mr. Incredible (Craig T. Nelson), mother Helen Parr/Elastigirl (Holly Hunter), daughter Violet (Sarah Vowell), son Dash (Huck Milner, replacing Spencer Fox as the actor had grown too old to play the prepubescent boy) and baby Jack-Jack (Eli Fucile)—facing off against John Ratzenberger’s cameo character The Underminer (completely contradicting the 2005 video game Rise of the Underminer, which I enjoyed playing as a teen). The family is arrested for their actions—as being a superhero is still illegal—yet contacted by an eccentric billionaire named Wilson Deavor (Bob Odenkirk) who is determined to make superheroes legal again. Bob, Helen and fellow friend/superhero Lucius Best/Frozone (Samuel L. Jackson), meet with Wilson and his sister Evelyn (Catherine Keener) to discuss their plan.
The siblings’s plan is to use micro cameras to record and share a superhero’s perspective with the people, over the media’s more negative perspective. They decide for Elastigirl to be their first line of progress and I appreciate the writers’s reasoning behind why she is chosen over Mr. Incredible: the siblings made a chart of past property damage between the three heroes and Elastigirl has the least destructive track record. It’s both a humorous and sensible (both in and out of film) reasoning behind Helen’s rise to protagonist status. As Elastigirl starts her new job to make superheroes great again, Mr. Incredible begins his new job as Mr. Mom—looking after Dash, Violet and the ever chaotic Jack-Jack who is just beginning to generate his powers.
It’s at this point where the plot begins to lose its momentum. One wonderous aspect to the original Incredibles is how it brilliantly deconstructs and then reconstructs the superhero genre with an array of witty and well-written scenes. The Incredibles 2 simply rides the waves of its predecessor—adding barely anything new to the superhero genre’s tropes, recycling jokes and scenes from the original, and, in some cases, playing some of the previous subversions straight. For example, there’s a scene where the main villain has Elastigirl completely under their hypnotic control, yet goes out of their way to place her into a giant subzero chamber (so her frozen limbs can’t properly stretch), that never shows up again, wake her up and explains their backstory and motives for no beneficial reason before placing Elastigirl back under their control. It’s the villain monologuing cliché played completely straight—a trope the first film beautifully tore apart on several occasions.
The only noteworthy subversion for the sequel is the traditional gender roles being swapped between Helen (now the superhero breadwinner) and Bob (now the stay-at-home parent). The action segments are entertaining to watch with Elastigirl as the star focus, allowing the animators to get a lot more creative given her "flexible" powers…except they don’t do that. For a superpower with endless possibilities, Elastigirl’s showcasing is limited and repetitive to what she does in the original. In general, there’s nothing spectacular, amazing or incredible regarding the fight sequences (though Frozone does get a really badass entrance to one of the fights). The final fight itself is mediocre, with a good portion focused on generic slapstick involving Jack-Jack’s powers and an underwhelming defeat of the main villain. Speaking of, the main villain is a pale shadow of the great Syndrome—having a hollow backstory, a confusing plan, a lackluster personality, and a surprise identity that’s easy to figure out early on.
The remaining family’s subplot feels incredibly minor and continuously drags on with little relevance to the main plot. Yes, it’s nice to see Bob bonding with his children, but the subplot feels so disconnected from Helen’s mission. Bob’s jealousy towards Helen being in the spotlight suddenly disappears without any defined development and his bonding with the kids has little impact on the finale or epilogue. There is still some wittiness to be found, such as Dash calling Helen while on her mission—asking if she knows where his eye-drops are while Bob’s shouting in the back “Do not call your mother!” The math scene seen in every trailer is a great joke I heavily relate to—having been in a similar position as Bob, trying to help elementary school kids with their math work and getting frustrated by the extras steps they have to perform nowadays; “I don’t know that way, why would they change math!? Math is math!”
Nonetheless, Bob's interactions with the kids feel like a detached B-plot of a television episode. The entire film itself feels like a weekly episode of The Simpsons—not a classic, high-quality episode from its golden era, however, but a modern episode that, while good, lacks the charm, wit, pacing and skilled writing of its glory days. As its own, separate superhero/animated feature, The Incredibles 2 works as a good film, yet as a sequel to one of Pixar’s best films, one of the best-animated films, and one of the best superhero films, The Incredibles 2 ends up a disappointing, unsatisfying product.
