An “Incredibles 2” Review That Doesn’t Compare Elastigirl to Fifty Shades

The pure delight of the first Incredibles roots in its first act, in the boulder of Bob Parr huddled inside a sedan listening to a police scanner, anxious to relive his glory days the way a fifty-something might with alcohol and old college buddies. Watching him battle an enlarging waistline in front of a wall-sized homage to his past—newspaper clippings and TIME Magazine covers that tell us, “this man was once great” —delivers a kind of curtain-stripping thrill. That thrill tightens to a tension as we watch the Parr family restrain their powers in cubicles and track meets, and is released in a dazzle of fight scenes and last-second rescues towards the movie’s end, when Bob and his equally-super wife, Helen, see a return to form.

In its second installment, the thrill of that trophy wall has faded a bit. We know the Parrs were once incredible and that they could be today, if only the government let them. So writer/director Brad Bird is smart to begin the film not at the dinner table or at insurance job number two, where the tension of the first movie might melt into impatience, but in those shiny red uniforms.

Unfortunately, this opening fight goes wayward: the cleverly-named Underminer escapes with stolen money, and the city has to foot a hero-sized bill for damages. Even worse, we discover that Mr. Incredible’s former day job — in insurance—would have protected the bank just fine without his help. This is as it must be. Unlike every other superhero film, where plots orbit heroes’ powers and the adventure those powers beget, “The Incredibles” worked specifically because it focused on the kinds of affairs a hero can’t punch through: parenting, marriage, getting old. Fourteen years later, it’s Frozone scrambling for a misplaced super suit that we remember, not Pixar’s equivalent of a Captain America elevator sequence.

Bird, as a result, faced a difficult challenge with “Incredibles 2”: to (compellingly) render the Incredibles’ powers inert by some mechanism other than the mid-life crisis with which Bob Parr wrestled in the first. He succeeded. With a timely revision to the first movie’s premise (Elastigirl out fighting “evil” and Mr. Incredible begrudgingly in the role of stay-at-home dad), Bird managed to preserve the charm of Incredibles struggling at regular games—our games—with an even warmer emotional core than the first. The movie sees Bob and Helen agreeing to a publicity campaign mounted by business tycoon Winston Deavor of Devtech, wherein Deavor fits Elastigirl with a bodycam and films her crime-fighting exploits to generate public support for supers. Elastigirl finds herself up against a suspiciously predictable villain, the Screen Slaver, while Mr. Incredible finds himself against a handful of far less predictable enemies: adolescence, math homework, and a baby who borders on omnipotent. The image of Bob Parr studying his son’s math textbook on a sleepless night is sure to jerk a few tears.

Despite its warmth, however, and despite the relevance and symbolism of the movie’s set-pieces—a vision of bodycams that reveal positive application of powers as opposed to their abuse, a criticism of our dependence on screens (“You don’t talk, you watch talk shows,” Screen Slaver drones at one point), a subversion of stereotyped gender roles—“Incredibles 2” delivers a slightly lesser punch than its predecessor. Perhaps this is because the central tension of the movie lies in wondering how everything will go wrong rather than how it’ll go right, which can make the story meander in spots. Likewise, the feint that inevitably caps such a structure may have been a bit too easy to catch.

Nevertheless, Bird successfully followed his first outing with Pixar, creating another rare superhero film where you leave the theater feeling closer-to-heroic than when you arrived. Contrasted with a film like Avengers, where I leave lamenting my lack of genius or brawn, I left the first Incredibles, and this sequel, feeling the opposite, having been told again and again in scene after scene that the challenges in life worth meeting don’t require super powers.