The Incredibles (2)

After a 14 year hiatus, Pixar has revived its family of super-heros, the Incredibles.  The eponymous film isn't worth the wait.  In fact, its bizarrely dull, just another overly loud and tediously long special effects film.  The plot is formulaic, the voice-actors seem exhausted and perfunctory, and the Pixar cartoon effects are mostly grotesque.  Mr. and Mrs. Incredible are defined by their secondary sexual characteristic:  the man has a huge barrel chest and enormous shoulders with a little head and a hatchet-shaped jaw; the female is displayed with a tiny wasp waist and an enormous Kardashian-style ass.  Throughout the film, the cartoon figures are poorly integrated into the hyper-realistic sets and meteorology.  Every inch of carpet, for instance, is textured to within an inch of its life and the skies are cerulean blue tinted with luminous pink sunrises and sunsets, vibrant with ornate densely figured clouds.  When someone splashes in water, the surge of fluid is more real and more spectacular than any water that you've ever seen in your life.  Buildings are animated so that every single brick is luminously detailed, tuck-pointed and slightly shadowed.  And, yet, in these ultra-real (surreal in fact), settings, the protagonists are absurd caricatures, sketches of human beings with featureless, uninteresting faces, dull eyes, and stylized bodies.  It just doesn't work -- the effect is jarring.  The cartoon figures with their primitively stylized rubbery-looking and mask-like faces and strangely inexpressive bodies just don't match the environment in which they are portrayed.  By far, the best animation in this overlong film is during the closing credits -- here, for the first time, we see really imaginative imagery in which the protagonists blend seamlessly with the futuristic sets in which they cavort -- this sequence is fantastically witty,  the technical disciplines obliquely demonstrated in the animation.  But, we're jaded by this point by and large, these sequences are as static (and gorgeous) as Japanese anime. 

For some reason, super-heroes have been outlawed.  This is notwithstanding a bravura opening sequence involving a mad scientist riding an underground drilling device about the size of a skyscraper.  (When facades crumble, the effect is so hyper-real that you gasp with amazement.)  Mrs. Incredible gets lured away from her family to interact with some sort of a high-tech impresario.  Mr. Incredible is left caring for the children.  (Here the movie trots out old sex and gender-role stereotypes that would have been embarrassing in a Hanna Barbara production like The Flintstones.)  Mrs. Incredible gets to fight a bad guy called the Screenslaver -- he uses kinky moire effects and flashing lights to hypnotize his victims.  (There is a witty reference to the opening of the old Outer Limits TV show -- the admonition not to adjust the picture because the sinister broadcaster on Tv controls the horizontal and the vertical.  I'm old enough to know what this means including the reference to the "horizontal" and "vertical" adjustments on an old TV set.  But how many people in the audience had the slightest clue what these words meant?  I saw the picture with young families -- couples born around 1991 with small children and, of course, they had no idea what the allusion meant.)  The film cuts back and forth between Mr. Incredible's travails with his infant, Jack-Jack, the baby monstrous with super powers that he can't control and Mrs. Incredible's adventures battling Screenslaver.  Of course, the adventures of the fat-assed lady super-hero are far more interesting than the domestic comedy involving Mr. Incredible, scenes that are pretty much a drag.  There are weird interpolations -- a tiny woman who is supposed to look like Linda Hunt appears for a mystifying interlude, and Samuel Jackson, shucking and jiving, does a turn as a ghetto-friendly superhero who freezes things.  These characters aren't well-integrated into the plot -- they seem just arbitrarily plopped down in the story, merely nominal characters who can be shelved until they are needed.  Worse, the dialogue is fantastically verbose and completely inert.  Weird psychological points are made:  in one scene, a villainess says that her brother has "conflated" the death of his parents with the absence of super-heroes.  Sometimes, the discourse is oddly elevated, as if translated from some formal foreign language.  But what kind of psycho-babble is this?  And, in fact, characters bloviate and utter cliches on and on, delivering long arid speeches that are totally uninteresting, and, in any event, unnecessary.  People have fond memories of the first iteration of the Incredibles and the young people attending the movie laughed obediently and their small children seemed amused.  But it's objectively a pretty terrible movie and, almost, unbearably dull. There was only one really alarming effect -- Jack-Jack, the marvelous baby, can move in other dimensions and, when he would vanish into the fourth or fifth or n-th dimension, his voice would come cackling through the sound system far in the rear of theater. The first time, this happened, a shiver ran down my spine.