Any film that is fourteen years in the making is going to have gargantuan expectations to live up to. A film from a studio that has one of the most impressive and nearly spotless track records in the industry is going to have even grosser demands to meet. So maybe the odds were stacked against the Incredibles 2 from the start. But while I went in looking for the next phase of the interesting and well rounded characters from the first film, what I got was a shallow retread of familiar themes and a movie that struggled to justify it’s own existence.
I think if you read any of my reviews you’ll quickly realize that I have no interest in burying the lead. I generally start with my overall impressions and in the body paragraphs I’ll burrow into the finer details of the movie I’m reviewing. So it may have come as a surprise that I didn’t like this movie, at least not as much as I thought I would. But I think my disappointment spreads a little further than it simply not being able to meet an overwhelming set of expectations.
I would like to start with what I felt the film did right as I do feel that the Incredibles 2 isn’t completely without merit. The voice talent is strong with Craig T Nelson and Holly Hunter being as wonderful this time around as they were fourteen years ago. I don’t think I have enough good things to say about the performances of these two, the strength of their work give the character a full and lifelike quality that was a joy to experience. Samuel L Jackson is as good as ever if a bit underutilized and I felt that Bob Odenkirk brought a much needed energy to the scenes he appeared in. That being said, as much as I like Katherine Keener I feel that her turn as Evelyn was underwhelming, but more on that in a minute. I also appreciated the quick and colorful animation that in some spots rivaled the tense and blood pumping action of the original.
But even with the strength of the animation it’s a very early sign that this movie sticks too closely to the past. Looking almost indistinguishable from how it did all the way back in 2004. The film starts exactly where the first one left off and right from that point Brad Bird had pigeon holed himself to tell a story that didn’t need to be told. An original film generally has a lot of room to pave it’s own path but a sequel has to be able to justify putting us back in a world with characters we’ve already met and places we’ve already seen and the Incredibles 2 just doesn’t do that.
The movie starts with an interesting enough premise, a proposal to make heroes legal again (if you remember they were banned prior to the events of the original.) But this thread just doesn’t go in any compelling directions and progresses in a pretty uneventful way to a pretty uneventful conclusion. But maybe you’ll argue that much like the first film the journey is worth more than the destination. But this movies journey is filled with non plot points and a shocking lack of character growth. The maturation and realization was such an essential pillar of the previous movie and the characters of the Incredibles 2 end in (almost literally) the same place they did the first time around. The new characters don’t do much remedy this as even the ones that have more than a few lines of dialogue don’t have a very distinct personality to speak of. Touching on a lack of personality the main villain is an absolute flop. Beyond what I felt was not Katherine Keeners best work (maybe she was just miscast), she was just painfully uninteresting and had amazingly weak motivation for the havoc she wreaked. I also found her to be poorly written, spewing these cliches speeches toward the end of the film that just didn’t fall in line with what I expect from this studio and especially this writer. While I wouldn’t say the writing was bad as a whole it was certainly lacking the sharpness from some of Pixar's best work. The hilarious quips and potent dramatic breaks were sorely missing this time around. The final nail in the coffin was it’s runtime. While the first film had a tight plot and blazing pace to it this movie would hit these long lulls in the story where not much would happen and it seriously hampered the movie.
Maybe the problem with this films lies less in my expectations for it but in it’s own legacy. It was a landmark for Pixar as a studio. The art direction and animation was a massive breakthrough for a studio that struggled to create human characters, and to set them in a movie that runs at such a breakneck pace and features such intense action- it was new ground for animation. The Incredibles 2 not only doesn’t break in new directions, I felt that it didn’t even live up to the quality mark that I would expect from a Pixar movie. The Incredibles 2 just isn't the movie I thought fourteen years would bring me.