Quick Critique: Incredibles 2

Quick Critique: Incredibles 2

I loved The Incredibles 1, it's great as a super hero movie and just as a movie too. Incredibles 2 is... it's fine. It's good. It's like one of those direct-to-VHS Disney movie sequels. It's competent but not as good as the original and struggles to justify its own existence outside of making more money out of an established franchise. It doesn't have anything to say so it comes across as kind of generic. They had 14 years to write a good story and they didn't make good use of that time.

The adult returning cast is great. Frozone is still fun, Mr. and Mrs. Incredible are still cool and interact well in enjoyable ways to watch. Holy cow are the kids way more annoying though. They were annoying in the beginning of first one but that's what their character arcs were. They were loud, frustrating brats that eventually had to learn to get their crap together and help the family out. In this one, they're just back to being brats, having abandoned anything they learned from the first one until maybe the last ten minutes of the movie. And the entire plot about Jack Jack the baby was totally unnecessary. It wasn't funny, it wasn't entertaining, it was just the same handful of jokes repeated over and over. Have you seen the bonus short Jack Jack Attack from the original movie? Then you've seen everything this movie does with the baby. Repeated many times over. It just sucks everything out of the movie but gets so much screen time. You even have to question why Edna is in the movie. Those scenes added nothing other than padding out the run time. What did we get out of it? She built the tracker? That kind of does nothing because the couple of seconds of notification it gives the family aren't useful, it doesn't stop the baby from using the powers, and they still need to give him cookies to get him back. The baby's new suit counters one of his powers, that's it. All of the new characters fall really flat though. The two humans are there and the bad guy technically has a plan, but all the new supers save for one are either boring or really off-putting. The super characters we met in Incredibles 1 made more of an impact in their few seconds on screen than any of the new supers, except for the one interesting one. And her personality was grating but she had really cool powers that will seem inventive and fun as long as you have never played Portal or watched the beginning of X-Men Days of Future Past.

If you can ignore the bad story telling and view it as just another comic book movie, it's enjoyable. You've seen everything in it before, but it has some neat fights scenes. Incredibles 1 was more than just a few fight scenes. It used super heroes to tell a very down to Earth story about a family kind of falling apart and the oppression of mundanity, while still offering playful jabs at the super hero genre. Incredibles 2... has some neat fights scenes. If you liked the first one, it's well worth a rental, but if you didn't like the first or are generally kind of burned out on super hero movies, it's an easy skip.