With the current saturation of superhero flicks, it’s kind
of easy to forget what a big deal The Incredibles was back when it came out in 2004. Not only is it
widely considered one of Pixar’s best, but it’s also considered a benchmark in
the entire superhero genre. And in many ways, it was ahead of the curb, playing
the family dynamic of a hero team better than any film version of Fantastic 4, addressing the collateral
damage they cause before The Avengers or Captain America: Civil War, and
addressing the toxic nature of fan culture before the Kick-Ass movies. A lot of people thought the day would never come
when we’d get an Incredibles sequel since it’s been fourteen years since the
original and director Brad Bird was preoccupied with making live-action films
for a while. Then again, one of the greatest
movies of the 21st century was a thirty-year late sequel made by
a man who spent that time making family films, so stranger things have
happened.
In case you need a refresher, the original Incredibles stars a family of superheroes:
Bob (Craig T. Nelson) AKA Mr. Incredible, his wife Helen (Holly Hunter) AKA
Elastigirl, and their children Violet (Sarah Vowell), Dash (Huck Milner) and
Jack-Jack. Superheroes were made illegal and forced into retirement, but they
came out of hiding after being discovered by a supervillain who’s been picking off
supers one by one, so he can pretend to be one himself. Picking up immediately
where the first left off, Bob, Holly and their friend Frozone (Samuel L.
Jackson) are approached by a pair of sibling telecom billionaires (Bob Odenkirk
and Katherine Keener) who are spearheading a movement to bring superheroes back
into legality. They pick Elastigirl to be their spokeswoman and perform a
series of stunt daring-dos since she’s the least destructive of the two, just
as a new supervillain called The Screenslaver emerges with the power to
hypnotize people through their TV screens. Meanwhile, Mr. Incredible has to
stay home and look after the kids while his wife gets to go off and do all the
hero work.
One might be worried by that description that Brad Bird’s
fetishization of old-fashioned aesthetics has gone full retrograde since the
plot can be boiled down to “Mr. Mom,
but everyone has superpowers”, and the bulk of the comedy comes from the
reversal of gender roles. Thankfully the humor is mostly at the expense of parenthood
itself and not Bob’s frustration with solo child-rearing. It opens up to a lot
of interaction between Bob and the kids that was sorely lacking in the
original, and there’s an understandable personal mental block for his struggle besides
jealousy that his wife gets to go out and be the hero. Of course, the whole “taking
care of a baby” subplot is nothing new to animation, especially when
magic/superpowers are thrown into the mix, but Jack-Jack’s ever-growing arsenal
of powers make things interesting as the family discovers them one by one, and
there were many points where I found myself wishing we could go back to that.
But it's Helen who really shines in this. If there’s anything to take away from Brad Bird’s absence
from animation, it’s his knack for high-flying, free-wheeling action sequences.
Say what you will about Mission: Impossible
- Ghost Protocol or Tomorrowland,
but the action scenes in those movies were undeniably the highlights, and they
work especially well in animation, where the limitations are endless. Elastigirl’s
plasticity especially gives way to an escalating daisy chain of bet-you-can’t-top-this
spectacle. She’s given a motorcycle and you wonder why she needs one in the
first place, but then they show you what she can do with it. There’s a one-on-one
fight scene in a close-quarters setting that feels genuinely claustrophobic at
times.
Beyond that, Incredibles 2 doesn’t do anything out of the
ordinary. In fact, the plot is more like a collection of loosely connected
ideas for Incredibles spin-offs. We’re introduced to a new team of heroes with
their own unique powers, but most of them are glorified henchmen. The twist of
who the Screenslaver’s true identity is can be seen from a mile away, and
unlike Syndrome, their motivation doesn’t really tie in thematically with the
main plot. (It still has a lot of the Randian overtones from the first movie in
case you were wondering.) I heard his backstory is eerily similar to one of the
villains from My Hero Academia, but having
never seen it, I can’t confirm this. Bird himself said that he wouldn’t make
another Incredibles movie unless he could come up with a story that was on par
or surpassed the original, and while it is thematically consistent, simply
having the same story again but with the roles reversed feels a bit more like something
they would’ve rushed out after the first one’s success and not something they’d
make fourteen years after the fact.
As harsh as I was toward this movie, I still enjoyed it and
think it’s at least worth a matinee. Will I be eager to see it again any time
soon? Probably not. The Incredibles was never my favorite Pixar movie for
whatever reason, but I know plenty of people who do consider it among if not
their best, and for them I think they’ll find it a worthy successor. If I were to rank this in the Pixar Pantheon, it would be somewhere in the mid-tier between A Bug's Life and Finding Dory.
7/10
No comments:
Post a Comment