‘INCREDIBLES 2’ IS MARVEL-OUS
A SUPER FAMILY FILM
INCREDIBLES 2 Running time: 118 minutes. Rated PG (mildly scary sequences). In theaters Thursday.
I T may be 14 years later, but the Parr family — a k a the Incredibles — hasn’t aged a bit. Pixar’s computer bits have improved, however, and this sequel to the 2004 movie is an impressive feat of animation, particularly in its action sequences.
“Incredibles 2” is a welcome return visit with that otherwisenormal family of superheroes: Mr. Incredible/Bob (Craig T. Nelson), Elastigirl/Helen (Holly Hunter) and their three kids, Violet (Sarah Vowell), Dash (Huck Milner) and baby Jack-Jack (Eli Fucile).
This time around, Elastigirl takes center stage as she teams up with a couple of rich siblings eager to help bring superheroes — who are now officially illegal — back to their former glory.
Tech-company owners Winston and Evelyn Deavor (Bob Odenkirk and Catherine Keener, both great) enlist her to wear a tiny camera as she foils crimes so the public can see just how super she really is. It’s satisfying to watch Hunter’s character get to stretch her legs — so to speak — as she heads out alone on her Elasticycle, thrilling a car full of teenage girls she passes.
The animators go into overdrive as she saves a runaway train at sunset — the clouds turning a psychedelic pink. The mysterious villain-hypnotist she’s fighting, Screenslaver (Bill Wise), is impressively dark for a Disney film, issuing manifesto- esque statements about how superhero worship is a dumb substitute for dealing with real life. I wondered if Marvel had been allowed to read the script beforehand.
Bob, meanwhile, is learning how to be a stay-at-home parent, and it requires the squarejawed behemoth to use new muscles. Violet’s got boy problems (or, as Dash puts it, “Is she having adolescence?”), and the baby — whose nascent superpowers were seen near the end of the first film — is going haywire. There’s one sequence in which Jack-Jack takes on a raccoon in the back yard that is a couple of minutes of pure, blissful cartoon comedy. It could stand on its own as a short. (And it’d be one I liked better than “Bao,” which precedes this feature; its dumpling-comes-tolife plot, in which a woman raises a dumpling-child as her own, struck me as awfully maudlin for children.)
Finally, it all gets to be too much, so thankfully, Bob takes the little one to visit “Aunt Edna,” the scene-stealing, bobhaired designer Edna Mode (di- rector Brad Bird) from the first film. She’s “not a baby person” (duh!) but takes a shine to the newly amazing Jack-Jack.
Of course, no Pixar film would be complete without a John Ratzenberger cameo, and Isabella Rossellini pops in as a Madeleine Albright-esque ambassador who’s a big Elastigirl fan. Samuel Jackson’s Lucius/ Frozone shows up again to help save the day, and a new crop of disarmingly awkward superheroes is introduced, if somewhat underused, including Sophia Bush as the tur- quoise-haired, dimensionsplitting Voyd.
At nearly two hours, “Incredibles 2” could be a little shorter; it drags near its conclusion, when the largely kid audience around me started to lose focus. And it does seem oddly regressive, in this era, to have a supposed family man so unacquainted with the day-to-day of raising his own children.
I’m holding out hope for an “Incredibles 3” where Violet and Elastigirl team up against a baddie who calls himself The Patriarchy.