Sequel mistakes mayhem, calamity for excitement, wit

When writer-director Brad Bird made “The Incredibles” (2004), the superhero movie genre looked nothing like the overcrowded youth hostel it does today. The “XMen” movies, the fledgling “Spider-Man” franchise, and that was about it. This was pre-“Iron Man.” This preceded the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe and the DC Comics afflictions, if you can remember such a time.

Bird’s movie, about a family of “Supers” banned by the government from their calling and forced to integrate into unheroic middle-class life, combined elements of James Bond, “Our Man Flint,” “The Man (and “The Girl”) From U.N.C.L.E.” and a hundred other 1960s diversions, while scoring its comic zingers off the notion of an ordinary family of five in extraordinary situations, blessed with superstrength, stretchability, invisibility and speed, among other skills. While that film’s escalating destruction eventually crowded out the jokes, audiences dug it. And Michael Giacchino’s score was fantastic.

“Incredibles 2” is the 14-years-later sequel, again from Disney-Pixar, again from writer-director Bird. It’s just OK, which is somehow a little less than OK, considering the artistic heights the studio has scaled at its peak. Bird should know; his “Ratatouille” (2007) was one of the greats.

“Incredibles 2” falls short of the level of “Toy Story 2” or “Finding Dory.” Those Pixar sequels wholly justified their existence in many satisfying ways, while doing their corporate duty and making hundreds of millions.

This one, most likely, will be plenty big. But Bird’s rather strenuous sequel lands more in the camp of “Cars 2” and “Monsters University,” mistaking calamity and mayhem for real excitement and wit. In a narrative about how to handle your work/life balance to the benefit of both spouses as well as the betterment of your children, “Incredibles 2” seems content to punch the clock and do its job reasonably well.

The movie begins where the first one ended: With a stand-alone action sequence pitting the Incredibles against the Underminer, tearing up the city of Municiberg. Bob and Helen (voiced once again by Craig T. Nelson and Holly Hunter) are soon back to their mundanely happy lives under the superhero relocation program as Bob and Helen Parr, with their 14-year-old daughter, Violet (Sarah Vowell), 10-year-old son, Dash (Huckleberry Milner), and literal fireball, infant Jack-Jack.

The government ban on superheroics continues. But the Supers have billionaire allies hoping to change the public’s mind. They want Helen/Elastigirl as their public face, while Bob/Mr. Incredible shifts uneasily into domestic engineer mode. Tilted one way, “Incredibles 2” plays like a metaphor for all the grumbling white men in Hollywood reluctantly ceding power to the women in their midst.

The new player roster is headed by an adversary known as Screenslaver. He exerts mind control via digital screens large and small, inducing mass hypnosis and wreaking havoc.

The throwaway domestic bits are the best: JackJack double-patting his father awake, when Bob conks out during the bedtime storybook, for example. That said, a faint, musty air of “Mr. Mom”-era gender politics underpins much of this material. At this point in the superhero-clogged drains of our moviegoing psyches, it’s too bad Bird didn’t come up with something more arresting, or funnier.