Incredibles 2 (2018)
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Incredibles 2 Movie Review
Incredibles 2 is a 2018 animated superhero film directed by Brad Bird. It’s Pixar’s twentieth film and unfortunately it’s one of their weakest entries.
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“Done properly, parenting is a heroic act…
done properly“
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It happens right after the first movie, superheroes are still illegal and Helen here goes out and does the superhero work while Bob stays at home to parent the kids. The story is simply not all that great, even though it’s definitely solid. It’s good for a sequel, but I expect more from Pixar’s caliber. It deals with so many themes – feminism, the importance of marketing a product, the importance of laws and making new laws and kids being mentally more powerful than adults which in this case corresponds to Jack-Jack having more powers.
That last one is rather neat, but the others are only glanced upon and the movie never really deals with any of these important themes for enough time. It’s thus a sophisticated, but rushed movie that simply did not say what it wanted to say properly. As for its feminism, it’s obviously an updated version of the first movie in its approach, but that approach bothered me as the father was incompetent whereas the mother was great at her work plus it meant less developed male characters which is exactly what we got here.
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Yes, Bob Parr is never as great or as well developed and crucial as he was in the first movie. He’s ridiculously underpowered this time around and his overall parenting subplot felt like an extremely large detour which never connected all too well to the main story. They should have never split the family for such a long time as that hurt the movie significantly.
I liked his relationship with Violet, but he’s otherwise not particularly interesting. Speaking of Violet, she’s just as good as she was before and I really liked her story with her potential boyfriend as it was very well told. But Dash was simply too underused which frustrated me as he’s such a fun character. Jack-Jack, on the other hand, is a lot of fun, but most of his scenes felt like goofy detours meant to satisfy the smallest members of the audience.
Elastigirl is excellent as basically the main character here and she got some new cool powers, suits and a great vehicle and some cool gadgets. Some of her scenes pleasantly reminded me of Batman’s noir scenes and I loved them for that reason. Edna Mode is ridiculously underused, Frozone is forgettable this time around and Winston is such an uninteresting new character.
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As for that team of superheroes, they are fun but also not particularly important and this movie certainly had the problem of too many characters with the new ones not leaving a major impression. As for Evelyn, I liked the Screenslaver initially as the villain was quite cool visually, but she personally never made a strong impression on me, I did not care for her backstory and I just found her a failure of a villain. There was potential here, but eventually the villain ended up being quite weak and the twist quite expected.
As I said above, Mr. Incredible is frustratingly underpowered here, but Elastigirl has her great action sequences and she’s the only badass character here unfortunately as the kids joined the action a little bit too late which really bothered me. I have to praise the film’s action though as it’s pretty strong overall and sometimes even phenomenal with that first fight between Elastigirl and Screenslaver being absolutely thrilling to behold and amazingly executed in choreography. I wish the rest of the film was as fun as that scene was. The beginning was particularly annoying in all that heavy, uninteresting action and the final scene in the airplane was weak.
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Incredibles 2 features much improved animation from the first ‘Incredibles’, that’s for sure. But I would say it’s never as revolutionary as the first movie was in the hair department in particular. Here, everything looks great, polished and with particularly strong character designs and interiors, but it lacks the artistic touch which is the usual case for Pixar movies and especially sequels.
The voice acting is reliably strong once again with the highlights being again Craig T. Nelson and Holly Hunter. The direction from Brad Bird is not great and this is unfortunately his weakest movie by far. The humor is sometimes actually terrific, but mostly underused as is everything here. The emotion is lacking and even though the dialogue is great once again, the movie is never as engaging as the previous film owing to its very bad pacing with the two subplots being too disconnected and many scenes being rushed. The score is once again terrific though.
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Incredibles 2 is a highly overrated movie that is certainly solid, but undeniably inferior to the original film. It deals with many themes including feminism, the importance of marketing a product and especially the importance of laws, but all of those themes are underdeveloped as is everything in this film so the end result is sophisticated, but unfocused. Violet and Helen are definitely great, but by focusing so much on female characters, the males ended up being either uninteresting and seriously underpowered (Bob) or ridiculously underused (Dash). The villain was initially cool, but eventually turned out to be a major disappointment and the twist was beyond expected. The animation is great and some action scenes are simply marvelously executed, but the pacing is terrible and thus the movie is never as engaging as its predecessor. I get what they were trying to do, but separating the family for such a long time was never a good idea in my opinion. It’s in the end certainly a film that has its objective merits, but it’s still one of Pixar’s weakest and most undercooked efforts.
