Just the Ticket #135: The Incredibles 2

Article by Sean Wilkinson,

a.k.a. the Ticketmaster,

Hoping you, too, had an Incredible Valentine's Day!

I was also hoping that I would have more to say about today's movie selection, but I don't, so please share the love by remembering to Become A Ticketholder if you haven't already, comment your true feelings at the bottom of this post, help out my ad revenue as you read, and choo-choo-choose me on Tumblr, Reddit, Facebook, and LinkedIn to like what you see and receive the latest heart-shaped boxes of news on my content.

First, the positives about The Incredibles 2.

The original cast and crew return (Craig T. Nelson and Holly Hunter as Mr. and Mrs. Parr/Incredible, Samuel L. Jackson as Frozone--with a bigger part this time--John Ratzenberger as The Underminer, director Brad Bird voicing the first film's highlight and Super Suit designer Edna Mode, and Michael Giacchino providing that classic spy/superhero-influenced film score). We also get a Breaking Bad reunion with Bob Odenkirk (Saul Goodman) as Super advocate Winston Deaver and Jonathan Banks (Mike Ehrmantraut) taking over the role of government fixer Rick Dicker (because we still need immature adult jokes in these things) after Bud Luckey's death. The film is dedicated to Luckey, as well.

In terms of the animation, the action looks just as good as before, if not better (the handful of new and aspiring heroes introduced here help with that immensely), and the character models still have a bit of an action figure look, but are more textured and dynamically lit thanks to the intervening decade and a half of technological improvements.

I also loved the stay-at-home-dad stuff with Mr. Incredible trying to solve small but challenging domestic problems with Dash (math homework), Violet (the boy she crushed on in the last movie forgot her because Dicker mind-wiped him), and Jak-Jak (who is a Golden Age grab bag of powers that I won't list here because it's more fun if you experience it for yourselves, and it gives the audience one more reason to think Edna is awesome) that he has never had to deal with before. You can tell that all of this is breaking him, but he's more suited to it than the soul-sucking insurance job he got fired from in the last one.

And finally, it's impressive that Incredibles 2 is one of the extremely rare cases of a sequel having such solid (but not perfect, and I'll explain why when I get to the negatives) continuity after such a long hiatus between films. It picks up exactly where the first film left off, with Violet asking Tony to the movies and the Underminer showing up to rob a bank, only for the Incredibles to intervene and take up positions and stop him. But like in the last one, Mr. Incredible's strength causes too much collateral damage and Dicker has to fix things (for the last time because the government is shutting down the Super Relocation Program).

But from that point on, the negatives started to pile up for me. Or rather, the one, big negative that I felt like I was just watching the first one again with some gender roles reversed. Like, Incredible's strength causes financial hardship for the family, but a seemingly philanthropic and charismatic person offers one of the family (Elastigirl this time, so Mr. Incredible goes into chauvinistic pity party mode because she has better optics and less collateral damage than him) a chance to do hero work again even though Supers are illegal, but it turns out the philanthropist is working with an extremely obvious tech-savvy villain who wants to put an end to Supers with a big PR stunt that involves crashing a form of mass transit into a city, and the rest of the Incredible/Parr family must work through their interpersonal conflicts and come to their rescue. Evelyn Deavor (voiced by Catherine Keener, and her name is Evil Endeavor, get it?)/Screenslaver is, admittedly, a better, smarter, more calculating and intimidating villain than Syndrome was (the fact that she doesn't wear a cape is proof enough, let alone that her scheme came closer to succeeding), but that doesn't change how obvious and similar in motive they are.

And because it felt like I was watching the same movie twice after a certain point, Incredibles 2's runtime was more noticeably tiresome despite it only being three minutes longer than the first.

Now for the nitpicks and the continuity error. Winston Deavor is a great character--personality-wise, he's basically Pixar Saul Goodman, and I love that--but this movie released in 2018, and Donald Trump began running for president with the MAGA slogan in 2016, so Winston being a business tycoon who wants to "Make Supers Legal Again" (he says this twice in the film) made me groan. As for that continuity error, we didn't see Jak-Jak's powers much in the first film except for when he scared Syndrome with his beast and fire transformations near the end, and he was clearly using them in front of the babysitter offscreen when she called Elastigirl for help. Where the continuity fails is that Jak-Jak scared Syndrome in full view of the family, and yet, in Incredibles 2, they all act like they've never seen Jak-Jak's powers before. Yes, most of them are new, but the ones we already saw get shown off first here, and Mr. Incredible, Dash, and Violet (and later, Elastigirl) show genuine surprise. Maybe it was a distance thing? Like, because Jak-Jak and Syndrome were so high in the air, it was hard to see details?

But honestly, those are minor gripes compared to "I just watched the same movie twice," and when the movie you're watching twice is pretty good, it's hard to be savage. So, after searching my heart (as one should do in February, and every other month of the year), I've decided to share the love and acknowledge Incredibles 2 for what it is: a slightly better Incredibles with a techno-thriller twist.

A-

Speaking of animated stories with a techno-thriller twist, I have one more Anime Spotlight planned for February, and because I'm writing an entire month's worth of content (with the exception of Time Drops, which I haven't composed yet at the time of this writing) over the course of a week in January, I don't know where I will be academically by the time you have read this far or if I will have any March content composed. So please Stay Tuned and do as the Romans do (that's where the word, "romance" came from, did you know that?). And by Romans, I mean me, because please also share the love by remembering to Become A Ticketholder if you haven't already, comment your true feelings at the bottom of this post, help out my ad revenue as you read, and choo-choo-choose me on Tumblr, Reddit, Facebook, and LinkedIn to like what you see and receive the latest heart-shaped boxes of news on my content.

Much like a first date conversation, that call to action transition was awkward....

Ticketmaster,

Out.