Incredibles 2

A short film, BAO, took me on a roller coaster of emotions and memories in a way that THE INCREDIBLES 2 didn’t.  A woman tenderly makes dumplings for her husband as he zips off to work.  Alone and bored, one of the dumplings comes alive.  As the day progresses, mother “raises” her dumpling.  He goes to school, graduates, goes to college, finds a woman, gets married.  Pixar knows their audience and keeps their metaphors light; just as you suspect the dumpling is a metaphor, her real son returns home for a visit.

These are the sort of tender moments that THE INCREDIBLES captured so well fourteen years ago.  Having returned as Bob and Helen Parr–a.k.a. Mr. and Mrs. Incredible (Craig T. Nelson and Holly Hunter), and Lucius Best/Frozone (Samuel L. Jackson), these suburbanite super heroes pick up where we left off as they battle the comically ruthlesss Underminer.

Much thought went into the kinetics of action sequences to make them harrowing yet logically-constructed and easy to follow–Zak Snyder and Michael Bay, please sit down and take notes.   But the plot, however, again involves another admirer of super heroes and an effort to resurrect their popularity which begins in earnest and becomes twisted.¹  The action is plentiful.  The gags are funny.  Everybody is a day older.  The real villain is exactly who you expect.  And that’s about it.

That’s not to say it’s a dull film.  The voice acting is superb.  Isabella Rossellini’s Ambassador is almost a dead ringer for Kate McKinnon’s Angela Merkel (SNL).  Winston Deavor proves that nobody can play Bob Odenkirk like Bob Odenkirk, and that’s actually a delight to watch.  Jonathan Banks as Mr. Incredible’s government contact and long-time friend Rick Dicker, is a wonderful character actor.  Odenkirk and Banks might work well together some day as, say, a lawyer and a fixer.

Sadly, Kimberly Adair Clark, returning as the voice of Honey, is given little to do except lurk in the periphery of the story.  Catherine Keener’s Evelyn Deavor has some great Bechdel-shattering dialogues with Helen about work aspirations, but they’re ultimately setting up a plot element more than they are serving character development.

We can be thankful that, unlike SHREK and similar fare which attempt to connect to families through nauseatingly overused pop culture references, THE INCREDIBLES series continues to connect with families on a visceral, rather than commercial, level.  In fact, the film’s one brush with the zeitgeist may be purely fortuitous in its timing:  It involves a very determined raccoon, and it is absolutely hilarious.

1. In fairness to the writers, and without outright spoiling elements of the story, if the villain of the first film is the vengefulness, gatekeeping and toxic masculinity of white, male nerd culture then the villain of the second is its diametric opposite.