Delightful return of the family with a difference
Here is a sobering thought for anyone who saw The Incredibles during its original theatrical run: if time had been passing in the film world at the same speed as the real one, baby Jack-jack would now be just about old enough to sit his driving test. (Take comfort in the legal age being a little lower in the United States.)
Back in 2004, Pixar’s crime-fighting Parr clan were anomalies in more ways than one. The first X-men and Spiderman trilogies were both in full swing, but the phrase “cinematic universe” was still a twinkle in a marketer’s eye, and the superhero boom had yet to ignite. But in our post-infinity War world, is there much left for a nuclear family to do?
To answer that question, writerdirector Brad Bird has returned to first principles. Incredibles 2 is less a superhero film as we’ve come to know them than a gorgeously curated scrapbook of sharply observed household comedy, sublimely staged action, a pinch of Chuck Jones-era slapstick, and enough modernist eye candy to induce a sugar coma in design buffs. The film feels less like one great idea than a collection of good ones, but they amount to a more than worthy sequel with a leisurely rhythm and ambitious range.
It’s hard to imagine any other summer studio release, animated or otherwise, having the patience to move its characters into a John Lautner-esque futurist dream house, and then spend five minutes drooling over the fixtures and fittings.
But the house matters. In a very real sense it’s the main field of battle in Incredibles 2, which sees the Holly Hunter-voiced Elastigirl, aka Mrs Incredible, aka Helen Parr, return to work solo, while her Herculean husband Bob (Craig T Nelson) tries his hand at stay-at-home fatherhood. (As it transpires the family haven’t aged at all: the film picks up where the original ended, virtually to the minute.) The parental role swap is done at the behest of Winston and Evelyn Deavor, a brother-sister entrepreneur team voiced by Bob Odenkirk and Catherine Keener, who believe a spell of less destructive, more female-driven derring-do might help overturn the ban on super-heroics.
And there’s a need for her too, thanks to the arrival of a mysterious villain called the Screenslaver, who bends the public to his will via strobing patterns on hijacked television broadcasts.
Bird and his animators draw action better than most of their live-action contemporaries can shoot it – although since the first Incredibles film, Bird has shot some notable live-action stuff himself, on Tomorrowland and Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol.
The centrepiece here is a cityspanning chase scene in which Helen pursues a runaway monorail on her sleek red Elasticycle: it looks like The Dark Knight by way of Mad Men, and moves with a thrilling white-knuckle momentum that CGI only rarely builds up. That attention to weight and precision can be found everywhere, from a Looney Tunes interlude in which baby Jack-jack scraps with a raccoon in the garden, to the hilariously awkward body language of a young would-be superheroine called Voyd (Sophia Bush), who must have surely been modelled on a Twilightera Kristen Stewart.
The return of Samuel L Jackson’s Frozone and the Edith Head-like costume designer Edna Mode, again voiced by Bird himself, provide jabs of retro-satisfaction in their own way: I didn’t realise how glad I would be to see the latter again until Bob finds himself driving back up her snaking driveway, between pairs of perfectly cubic boxwood trees. These days, a digital shrub could be any shape under the sun. But from their vantage point at the cutting edge, Pixar knows there is no shame in dwelling on the past.