INCREDIBLES II (2018)

It's 2001, your last passion project film was a box office failure and you're undeterred in chasing after your next. One day you're pitching a project to disinterested Warner Brothers execs, the next you're heading the first ever Pixar movie directed externally, aided by the crew for said last box office failure. Your name is Brad Bird, THE IRON GIANT was a wash, and you're directing on a million dollars a grounded, 3d animated superhero film. That's THE INCREDIBLES, and you earned six times that million. You had something to prove commercially and artistically, creating a family film surprisingly more brutal than one'd might expect, and you proved it. You won.

Naturally following that success, you've got hordes of people now asking for the possibility of a sequel. Your answer is always consistent: you'll make it if you ever get an idea for one better than the first.

It's 2014. Superhero movies are well under way of running amok in theaters, and to much budget making back at that. Disney comes to you and tells you that they're going to strike while the iron's hot and ship out another INCREDIBLES--you can direct it or they'll find someone else to do it (or however that conversation went). TOMORROWLAND, your last movie, just bombed almost as hard as THE IRON GIANT. So... you throw together a script of unused INCREDIBLES ideas, ship it, the gambit pays off, and you've got another good addition to the cv.

But you didn't have anything to prove artistically this time. Let's be clear--this was going to put asses in seats regardless of how well it came out of the oven, so you hardly had anything to prove commercially either. TOMORROWLAND bombed, but INCREDIBLES II's a slamdunk on a goal two meters off the ground. So you were comfortable, and Pixar was comfortable. Real comfortable, actually, because they didn't have anything to prove on a technical level either. When Brad Brad revisited the studio (and to what WIKIPEDIA mistakenly refers to as an 'advantage', he found that "technology existed now to finally realize the designs in the way that they had hoped to realize them in 2004". His team marveled at how they didn't have to face problems like "We don't know how to do long hair, we don't know how to do humans, we don't know how to do muscles...". Together you lead a team without challenges, a team without artistic drive, a team without the means to work within and conquer limitations.

And with them, you directed and wrote some real primo superhero slop.

INCREDIBLES II is competent. It's a movie that has well directed action sequences and great camera work showing off its competent animation. It's a story that has brisk pacing. It's a competent Pixar film which you can't say about some of their more recent duds. Hell, its first hour is probably more solidly put together than any other Pixar movie of the past decade. So that's about where the bar is.

Well, the story is meaningless superhero slurry. There's a cast of like seven people so making the villain a guessing game is unsurprisingly very stupid. Her motive is incredible too--Evelyn's dad died because he relied too hard on superheroes rescuing him... during the period in which superheroes were illegal. But it's the supers' fault her dad died because he gave them hope or something in the first place. I'm struggling to imagine how this terrible character ended up in a villain slot in the first place. Did Bird Bird actually write this shit and think this was more interesting and better written than a comedically unhinged superhero idolizing child who failed to grow up? Because Syndrome is great. But this is the kind of dumb horseshit i expect from a DC film. Pixar? I have to imagine some employees at the studio approached Bird about this, about how snoozefest boring this shit was, and he just handwaved them because he knows what he's doing, or whatever. Maybe they didn't want to rock the boat. They cuff the villain too instead of killing her, she gets her SCOOBY-DOO line in, and Violet casually cold takes completely out of character as if she read off a teleprompter.

There's some other weird things going on with the villain that maybe hint at Disney meddling or a fear of backlash--lack of artistic balls, I'm trying to say. The villain, as 'screenslaver', monologues through a Helen Parr aerobics session about consumerism. She harshly criticizes those who stay stuck to their couches under the protection of superheroes, that media comfort zone. With the years put between THE INCREDIBLES and its sequel, it almost reads like a commentary on the state of Hollywood since and where the biggest budgets are going, what is so very comfortable to consumers who watch casually or religiously. but Disney bought Marvel in-between the release of then and now, and that's... Well, that definitely presents a conflict of interests. So that whole idea has to be reeled completely back, and we end up with a movie as creatively empty as the cape films it criticizes. It really is no better. Bill Bird, interviewed, said he'd wanted to avoid the tropes being used by other superhero films and focus more on the family. It does that (mostly...) but forgets to wrap the dynamic around something interesting--with teeth. THE INCREDIBLES has teeth for what it is: we see corpses. People die. Bob drinks a mimosa. There is an absolutely gut wrenching scene where a father learns his children are on a plane piloted by his wife and is then, gleefully, told they've been killed. What does INCREDIBLES II do? Tell a limp Saturday morning cartoon plot where it explores little of the dynamics it sets itself up for. Helen Parr never comes to question much what being away from the kids and back into the spotlight does to her psyche as a character. Bob, her parallel in the first movie, absorbed in his work affair, goes behind his wife's back to have new costumes made, slims down in trainyards to catch up with what he used to be. Just a bit more interesting, isn't that? Despite parr back in the bask of superhero glow, she doesn't develop at all. You're not really going to sell me those crumb of scenes where Elastagirl is somewhat apprehensive or is somewhat worried about Bob as character development, are you? Come on, that sucks. And God help you if you liked Dash at all from the first movie because he's less a character than the fucking baby this time. The scariest thing about the WIKIPEDIA section for writing is that it seems to make it sound like a good thing that Bird did "not have to develop new ones [superpowers]", that he did not "need to figure out how to deal with Violet and Dash being adults". come the fuck on, nothing easy is worth writing.

I've probably written enough. My hands are as out of breath as Craig T Nelson is for most of this. Makes you wonder why they didn't push things ten something years in the future and see what could've been done with the new family dynamics that followed. By starting right after the first INCREDIBLES, the only dynamic to solve is tired dad slapstick for an hour and twenty. Jesus Christ, it hasn't even fucking phased Bob nor Helen that their friends and compatriots from the glory days were systematically tortured and murdered by a psycho that almost stole their own baby. Like they don't give a shit, that's kind of amazing. Frozone doesn't give a shit either, lol, no one mentions it at all now that I'm thinking about it. God fucking damn, Brad.

This shit is really depressing. After THE INCREDIBLES and near equally beautiful RATATOUILLE, Bird Brain started writing Scientologist spy slop. Then he turned down STAR WARS to do TOMORROWLAND, and that one wasn't even an IRON GIANT situation of poor marketing--it was just an unliked movie. And then he releases this sloucher. Where's the fucking spirit, dude? Do you even like writing movies anymore? Where's that golden age of SIMPSONS passion once you had? Is this complacency what it means to succeed too hard? There isn't really a message at the end of INCREDIBLES II, so i'll give you my own: always do your best. Or at least better than this.