It’s been five days since I saw Incredibles 2, a movie I loved while I was watching it. It’s probably been five years since I last saw the original Incredibles (for the second time) with my kids. But here’s the thing. While I could easily describe the plot and business of the first movie to you right now, I find I can’t do so when it comes to the Incredibles outing I enjoyed only 108 hours ago without doing a quick read-through of its Wikipedia entry.
It should not be surprising that The Incredibles has stayed with me: It is one of the two or three greatest accomplishments in the 90-year history of animated features, and like all great works of popular art it has burned itself into the national consciousness (and mine). What does it say about Incredibles 2 that it didn’t and doesn’t and won’t, no matter how successful it is at the box office?
First, it says that however good a movie it might be, and it is a good movie, Incredibles 2 isn’t a classic. Which is too bad, I guess, because on rare occasions great movies do produce great sequels. The Godfather Part II is, of course, a signature example of this, as is The Empire Strikes Back—two films whose partisans dare to suggest they are actually superior to the originals. (They’re not. Don’t @ me.)
The problem with Incredibles 2 is that everything is good about it but the plot. It has two jaw-dropping sequences—a chase scene involving a train and a duel between a superpowered baby and a hostile raccoon—that surpass any single scene in The Incredibles. But the story turns out to be a knockoff of the first, in which Mr. Incredible and his wife, Elastigirl, switch roles—which means she becomes a dupe of a supervillain just as he did in the original.
Incredibles 2 begins at the moment the first movie ends, with a supervillain called the Underminer drilling holes underneath Metroville—the gorgeously out-of-time, always-midcentury Richard Neutra city that is just one of the many brilliant conceits of writer-director Brad Bird’s Incredibles universe. To fight the villain and win the day, the superpowered members of the Parr family—Mr. Incredible, Elastigirl, and their three children—openly flout the anti-superhero law that drove them underground in the first movie. Officials are no more appreciative of their efforts than they were before, and the government program that oversees (and presumably provides support to) them is canceled.
A suspiciously cheerful and friendly billionaire worshiper of the outlawed supers from way back appears out of nowhere to champion their cause and work to change the law. Said billionaire and his cynical sister suggest it’s time to flip the script and make the supers heroes again—and that it’s Elastigirl who needs to be the center of this public campaign.
This humiliates Mr. Incredible, who is left behind to take care of the kids. He quickly learns that the job of helping his son learn the “New Math” and dealing with his teenage daughter’s social problems at school is as complicated and fraught as dealing with a threat to all humankind.
Bird is too inventive and resourceful a writer and director to copy anyone else’s work—his version of Mr. Incredible learning to be Super-Dad is the best and funniest version of that tired narrative we’ve seen in a very long time. And turning the gloriously snappish costume designer Edna Mode (the one who declared “no capes” in the first) into a kind of Auntie Mame for the Incredibaby is inspired beyond words. But, alas, Bird does end up in Bad Plot Hell when he uses hypnotism as a key device, since mind control is easily the worst storytelling trope there is aside from time travel.
What elevated The Incredibles into the stratosphere was the way Bird slowly raised the stakes and the dangers facing his superheroes. Mr. Incredible is laid low when he believes his family has been killed. Elastigirl has to give her children specific instructions on how to save their own lives should they face imminent death. And by that point he had so successfully made us believe in the world he had created that it all packed quite a wallop.
That just doesn’t happen here. But that’s not to say it might never happen. Pixar managed the previously unimaginable feat of making a second sequel, Toy Story 3, that is very nearly the equal of the original (after a very good but not great Toy Story 2). Who’s to say Brad Bird can’t do the same with Incredibles 3? You know he’s going to make it.
