It’s been nearly 14 years since Pixar’s The Incredibles raised the bar on superhero movies, but not a second of screen time passes between it and The Incredibles 2, which picks up the action so fluidly that a swiftly paced four-hour feature is only a splice away. But a lot has changed in that (real-life) time gap: the superhero mythos has been darkened, lightened, serialised and bundled into ubiquity. Now writer-director Brad Bird faces the Ayn Rand-esque threat posed by Syndrome, the imposter villain of the first one: “When everyone’s super, no one will be.”
The decision to begin The Incredibles 2 at the end of The Incredibles is the most conservative choice possible for a company looking to cash in on one of its biggest hits. It also happens to be right. Bird gets the freedom to put his head down and send his characters on a new adventure without having to worry about where they belong in the DC and Marvel universes, or which themes and moods might be en vogue. There are plenty of signs of modernity here, including stunning advances in Pixar’s photorealistic backdrops and an electronic menace tailored for the smartphone age, but Bird has reason to feel confident that his family of superheroes doesn’t need to be reinvented. Like all families, they’re a perpetual work in progress.
Not that every idea is a novel one. There’s no more exhausted concept than a society that rejects superheroes for doing more harm than good, and no easier sentiment than deriding politicians for not understanding “people who do right”. But The Incredibles 2 opens with a fresh reminder that the specials are not always appreciated, especially when a mission like stopping the Underminer (John Ratzenberger) causes far more damage to public property – a monorail that flies off the track, a collapsed bridge, a giant drill-bit boring into city hall – than the money in a bank vault could cover. The supers remain illegal, leaving Mr Incredible (Craig T Nelson), Elastigirl (Holly Hunter), and their three precocious children homeless, jobless and living out of a motel room, resigned to a future of more white-collar drudgery as Bob and Helen Parr.
It isn’t long before a new opportunity arises, and the film finds its groove. A glad-handing telecom billionaire (Bob Odenkirk) and his tech-savvy sister (Catherine Keener) believe that superheroes are a benefit to society and put their vast resources behind Elastigirl as the face of a PR revival. While she thrives in the role, Mr Incredible plays Mr Mom in a gadget-filled mansion on loan, haplessly juggling lovelorn 14-year-old Violet (Sarah Vowell), 10-year-old troublemaker Dash (Huckleberry Milner), and baby Jack-Jack, who has about a dozen unmanageable superpowers. The entire family gets called into action against Screenslaver, a mysterious and untraceable danger that hypnotises and controls the masses through TVs, teleprompters and any other monitor in the room.
Bird teases out some provocative ideas, like having the Parrs fight over dinner about whether it’s OK to break unjust laws to fix them or suggesting that society’s addiction to screens is a ticket to mind-rotting conformity. But mostly the abundant pleasures of The Incredibles 2 are simpler and more visceral, like the slapstick delight of Jack-Jack fighting with a raccoon. (The introduction of new Z-grade heroes – like Reflux, an old man with corrosive stomach acid, and Crusher, a burly dope who can crumple but not un-crumple – adds more variety and comedy to the mix.) Compared to the CGI chaos that tends to engulf DCEU and MCU movies, especially in crossover teamups, the clean zip of Pixar animation feels exhilaratingly rare, like a lost language rediscovered.
With the peerless Toy Story trilogy as the obvious exception, most of Pixar’s worst films are sequels – Cars 2 and 3, Monsters University, Finding Dory – because they siphon off the originals without even attempting to match their audacity. The Incredibles 2 plays it straight, too, but Bird revivifies the expected elements, like the hilarious return of costume creator Edna Mode, and considers the family from a new angle. Mr Incredible and Elastigirl swapping gender roles is good for some fish-out-of-water laughs – his frustration over new elementary-school math techniques really hits home – but Bird seizes on a key insight: healthy families can reconstitute themselves and come out better for it. Healthy sequels can, too.
