Elastigirl is thrust into the limelight while her husband plays daddy daycare, as Pixar slickly revisits the beloved superhero family after 14 years.
It’s been nearly 14 years since Pixar’s The Incredibles raised the bar on superhero movies, but not a second of screen time passes between it and The Incredibles 2, which picks up the action so fluidly that a swiftly paced four-hour feature is only a splice away. But a lot has changed in that (real-life) time gap: the superhero mythos has been darkened, lightened, serialised and bundled into ubiquity. Now writer-director Brad Bird faces the Ayn Rand-esque threat posed by Syndrome, the imposter villain of the first one: “When everyone’s super, no one will be.”
The decision to begin The Incredibles 2 at the end of The Incredibles is the most conservative choice possible for a company looking to cash in on one of its biggest hits. It also happens to be right. Bird gets the freedom to put his head down and send his characters on a new adventure without having to worry about where they belong in the DC and Marvel universes, or which themes and moods might be en vogue. There are plenty of signs of modernity here, including stunning advances in Pixar’s photorealistic backdrops and an electronic menace tailored for the smartphone age, but Bird has reason to feel confident that his family of superheroes doesn’t need to be reinvented. Like all families, they’re a perpetual work in progress.
Not that every idea is a novel one. There’s no more exhausted concept than a society that rejects superheroes for doing more harm than good, and no easier sentiment than deriding politicians for not understanding “people who do right”. But The Incredibles 2 opens with a fresh reminder that the specials are not always appreciated, especially when a mission like stopping the Underminer (John Ratzenberger) causes far more damage to public property – a monorail that flies off the track, a collapsed bridge, a giant drill-bit boring into city hall – than the money in a bank vault could cover. The supers remain illegal, leaving Mr Incredible (Craig T Nelson), Elastigirl (Holly Hunter), and their three precocious children homeless, jobless and living out of a motel room, resigned to a future of more white-collar drudgery as Bob and Helen Parr.
For more read the full of article at The Guardian
