Brad Bird spent 14 years getting back to the Parrs. Incredibles 2 picks up seconds after the 2004 film ended — the Underminer is still climbing out of the ground, and the family is still in costume. What follows is a sequel that swaps its leads, hands the action to Holly Hunter, and asks Craig T. Nelson to lose a fight with a baby. In this paper’s view, it is the rare follow-up that understands its predecessor’s real subject was never punching. It was paperwork, marriage and the question of who watches the kids.
Trailer, via Pixar.
The Underminer, the Bank, and the Bill for City Hall
The film opens with the Parrs and Lucius Best, voiced by Samuel L. Jackson, battling the Underminer in Municiberg. They keep him from destroying city hall. They do not keep him from robbing a bank and getting away. The property damage from the fight is enormous, and the government responds by shutting down the Superhero Relocation Program, cutting off the financial aid that has kept the “supers” afloat.
That is the engine of the whole movie. The Incredibles are not fighting a villain for most of their runtime. They are fighting a public relations problem, and the people selling the solution are Winston and Evelyn Deavor, wealthy siblings who run the telecommunications company DevTech. Their pitch: send superheroes on secret missions, record everything, broadcast it, and win back the public’s trust.
Winston, voiced by Bob Odenkirk, picks Helen for the first missions. His reason is unsentimental and funny — she has caused the least property damage. Helen is reluctant. She does not want to leave her family, and she does not want to break the law. Bob talks her into it.
A Mansion, a Math Worksheet, and Jack-Jack
The Deavors move the Parrs into a luxury mansion, which is where the film’s second plot starts. Bob stays home. He has Violet, who is miserable because Tony Rydinger forgot their first date — and because Agent Rick Dicker, trying to protect her secret, erased Tony’s entire memory of Violet instead of just the incident. He has Dash, who has math homework. He has Jack-Jack, whose powers keep emerging at a rate nobody can track.
Nelson plays the whole thing as a man slowly losing an argument with his own household. He suppresses his envy of Helen. On Lucius’s advice, he calls Edna Mode, voiced by Bird himself, to babysit Jack-Jack. It is the film’s best comic detour and its most efficient piece of characterization: Edna discovers Jack-Jack has more powers than any super she has ever seen.
Screenslaver, the Hovertrain, and a Pizza Guy
Helen’s missions take her to New Urbem, where she runs into Screenslaver — a hacker who can hypnotize people through any screen. She stops him from destroying a crowded hovertrain. She stops his attempt to assassinate an ambassador. She tracks his signal, finds his base, beats him, and unmasks him.
He is a disoriented pizza delivery driver. He has no idea what is happening.
That is the film’s turn, and this paper’s read is that it is a good one. Screenslaver is not a person. Screenslaver is a screen, and the movie has built its whole middle act out of broadcasts and monitors — the DevTech apparatus — so the reveal lands as an indictment of the audience as much as the villain. Evelyn Deavor, voiced by Catherine Keener, is the one behind it. Her motive, as the film gives it, is not money. It is a grudge against superheroes themselves, and against the idea that the public should be grateful to them.
What the Cast Does With the Swap
Hunter is the movie’s center and the reason the swap works. Elastigirl’s powers are, to this paper’s eye, the most visually interesting in the family — the stretch, the reach, the way she moves through a room — and Bird builds action around her that the first film never had room for. She is also, crucially, having fun. Helen gets a stretch of screen time where she is simply good at the job.
Nelson’s job is harder and he does it without asking for sympathy. Bob Parr is a man who was built to be the center of the frame, and the film puts him in the kitchen. The script never lets him off with a joke. His envy is real, his frustration is real, and the movie treats his competence at home as a thing he has to earn rather than a thing he already has.
Vowell’s Violet gets the film’s quietest thread — a girl whose first date was erased from a boy’s memory, which is a strange and specific kind of heartbreak. Huck Milner takes over Dash from Spencer Fox, and the speedster material is thinner than before. Jackson’s Frozone is used sparingly and lands every time. Odenkirk plays Winston as a true believer, which is more interesting than a cynic would have been.
A Sequel That Refuses to Repeat the First One
Bird has said he delayed the sequel to work on other films, and that he tried to distinguish the script from the superhero films and television that arrived between 2004 and 2018. The strategy was to focus on the family and not the genre. That choice is visible in every scene. There is no origin story here, no training montage, no team assembly. There is a marriage negotiating a reversal of roles, and three children with three separate problems, and a baby who can turn into a demon.
The cost of that choice is a villain problem. Screenslaver is a strong idea and a weak character. The hypnosis mechanic is genuinely unsettling — the idea that any screen can take you — but the film spends so much time on the Parrs that Evelyn never gets the space Syndrome had. Her plan is legible. Her grievance is not.
The other cost is Dash. The first film gave him a track meet and a chase. This one gives him homework. Milner is fine. The material is not.
What Holds Up and What Doesn’t
The animation is, in this paper’s judgement, the best Pixar had put on screen at that point, and the action sequences are staged with a clarity that most live-action superhero films never manage. The hovertrain rescue is a real set piece — it has geography, stakes and a solution the audience can follow. The musical score is a strength of the film and does the work of holding the family theme and the action theme in the same frame.
The humor is broader than the first film’s, to our ear. Jack-Jack’s powers are the running gag, and they are a very good gag, but they are a gag. The 2004 movie felt drier and stranger to us, and had more on its mind about mediocrity and resentment. Incredibles 2 is warmer. It is also, at 118 minutes, a little longer than its ideas require.
What it gets right, in our view, is the thing that mattered most. The Parrs read as a family first and a team second, and the film does not pretend otherwise. Bob’s arc is not about reclaiming the spotlight. It is about noticing what Helen has been doing alone for years. That is a better story than a rematch with a villain would have been, and we think Bird knows it.
14 years is a long time to wait for a sequel that mostly wants to talk about childcare. We think it earns the wait anyway.
The Numbers
- Title: Incredibles 2
- Year: 2018
- Director / Writer: Brad Bird
- Studio: Pixar Animation Studios for Walt Disney Pictures
- Runtime: 118 minutes
- Premiere: Los Angeles, June 5, 2018
- US theatrical release: June 15, 2018
- Worldwide gross: over $1.2 billion
- 2018 rank: fourth-highest-grossing film of the year
- Metacritic: 80/100
- Score: 8.0/10
How It Stacks Up
| The Incredibles (2004) | Incredibles 2 (2018) | |
|---|---|---|
| Director / Writer | Brad Bird | Brad Bird |
| Lead in action | Bob Parr / Mr. Incredible | Helen Parr / Elastigirl |
| Bob’s role | Returning to the suit | Stay-at-home parent |
| Villain | Syndrome | Screenslaver / Evelyn Deavor |
| Voice of Dash | Spencer Fox | Huck Milner |
| Voice of Rick Dicker | Bud Luckey | Jonathan Banks |
| Runtime | Not given in source | 118 minutes |
To this paper, the comparison is the point. Incredibles 2 is not a bigger version of The Incredibles. It is an inversion of it, and the inversion is the reason it works. Bob’s greatest challenge is not a supervillain. It is his three children.
The other thing worth naming: the film is dedicated to Bud Luckey, the original voice of Rick Dicker, who retired from the role in 2014 and died in 2018. Jonathan Banks took over the part. That is a small production note, and to us it is also the kind of detail that tells you how long this movie sat in development.
Our verdict is straightforward. Incredibles 2 is a strong sequel with a weak antagonist and a better emotional core than most films in its genre bother to build. It swaps its leads and, to our eye, does not lose its footing. It gives Hunter the best material of her career in the role and gives Nelson the hardest. It is not the first film. It is not trying to be.
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