Incredibles 2 critique- by Schaffrillas Productions

Full text transcript of Incredibles 2 critique

Before I talk about this movie, I want to quickly go over Bow, the short film that preceded the movie this short absolutely melted my heart in a way only Pixar can. It’s funny. It’s touching. It’s, well, animated. I wasn’t sure it was going at first, but by the time we got to the end, I found myself holding back tears. It was magical. And given some recent allegations that have come out about Pixar not valuing women and minority voices as much, it’s so great to see a Pixar short directed by an Asian woman. I also wanted to bring this show up because it was much better than the movie.

This movie is not great. I hesitate to say it’s not good because it’s still got these excellent characters delivering excellent dialogue. Seriously, the talking bits are the best part of the movie by far. But besides that, I found this movie exceedingly dull. The story is laughably predictable. The action feels like it’s doing the bare minimum and not making creative use of these powers. The villain is super weak and underdeveloped. The jokes are either undercooked or nonexistent, potentially fun and interesting. New characters are wasted and underdeveloped. Mr. Incredible Jealousy Arc throughout the movie kind of gets dropped entirely. The score is shockingly forgettable and the climax is just so lame. Another problem I had that really is in the movie’s fault is that if you’ve seen the trailers, you’ve basically seen half the movie. There’s really very few surprises that the trailers left out. But thankfully, they didn’t spoil the niftiest scene in the movie where the animation has a chance to become a really distinct and unique kind of like this, but not as good. OK, with that, I think it’s time for spoiler thoughts. So click away if you haven’t seen the movie yet and if you want an arbitrary review score, here you go. OK, spoilers start now. First of all, and I know this isn’t much of a spoiler since it’s at the beginning of the movie, but the movie copies the ending of the Jack Jack attack short almost verbatim with Violet’s love interest and of the babysitter as if we wouldn’t notice. Then the underminer fight, which has been built up for 14 years, is disorienting, the edited and ultimately kind of underwhelm. Then, after some, quite frankly, excellent dialogue scenes with a family, we meet billionaire Mark Beeks and his sister, the evil white lady from Get Out. They have a tragic backstory where their parents died because burglars broke in. And instead of going to a safe room, the dad tried calling superheroes on the phone instead and the bad guy shot him.

But like, how would the supers have gotten to them in time?

He clearly should have gone to the safe room and it was his own fault, even though the movie will try and paint this as the fault of the supers going into hiding anyway, I guess get out girl was mad at all supers after this, so she created an elaborate ruse. Or she pretends to be this evil screen who hypnotizes people.

Oh, I see what you did.

So she lets the last girl constantly thwart the screen saver, building her up as this great hero, even though that’s kind of contradictory to the goal of getting the public to hate heroes. Then she confronts the screen and the nifty animated sequence I mentioned earlier, who ends up blowing up an apartment building that’s shown to be full of people? And do they ever address if they made it out OK? Did did those people just die? Also, it turns out this screen saver was just a decoy, a pizza delivery guy who delivered the pizza cold to get out, lady, OK.

At one point in the last two girls in a limo and she passes by all these adoring fans with signs showing their support for her. Then the limo stops so she can talk to this little girl who’s holding a sign and she asks her, what is your sign? Say the girl lifts up the sign and says the screen saver is still out there. Quick question. What the fuck? Who is this little girl? Why did she have this sign? Why did she never turn up in the movie again? All these potentially cool new supers get wasted and turned into mindless Hawkeye’s zombies almost immediately. Well, it’s kind of cool to see The Incredibles use their powers against these powers. It’s still a shame that these guys have zero personality or things to do except this avoid girl who has glimpses of personality but isn’t around long enough to show it. I wanted her to team up with the last girl, or better yet, I wanted Vialet after being her in a one on one fight on the yacht to take off the mind control mask and team up with her to fight and free the other supers. That would have been a really cool dynamic.

But no. And yeah, I’m just going to come out and say these designs are awful. They’re so bad. This dude looks like he was ripped straight out of a fortnight and it makes me want to vomit anyway, after the honestly pretty boring climax where they have to turn a ship so it doesn’t crash into a city, which is a lot less exciting than it sounds. And it doesn’t even really sound all that exciting to be on superheroes. I made legal, again, despite all the havoc that occurred on the boat and despite all the assholes in this movie actively pushing for superheroes to remain illegal, I guess they already ratified the accord. So there wasn’t anything they could do to stop the legalization. Hey, wait, why didn’t get out forced the supers to take control of the boat before everyone signed the document legalizing superheroes. Do you want Soopers legal or not? OK, so those are my thoughts on Incredibles two. Is it a bad movie? No, definitely not. But it’s not a very good movie either. It’s about as perfectly average as a Pixar movie can get, and it will definitely not make you feel like most Pixar movies do. I honestly think Finding Dory is a better Pixar sequel because while it does have its fair share of problems, it still has this. The sheer amount of raw emotion in this scene, hell, in this still image is heartbreaking. Nothing in Incredibles two even comes close to the brilliance of this one image. I don’t really like this movie that much for a variety of reasons, and I don’t know if you noticed, but I went this entire review without comparing this movie or even mentioning The First Incredibles.

If I wanted to do a direct comparison, things would not be pretty.

The only thing this movie does better over its predecessor, aside from obviously the animation, is that it makes Violet and Jack Jack much more entertaining characters. I can go into detail about how this film lacks an excellent villain, a dynamic score, a neat Bond esque motif, character arc resolutions, genuinely heartbreaking moments and most important of all, these two characters. But I’m sure you get the picture, six out of 10 needs improvement.