Spider-Man: Far From Home – Review

It finally happened!  I saw a relatively current movie, and in fact, I saw two in a row in what was my first ever theater-bound doubleheader experience.  Spider-Man: Far From Home is Marvel’s latest billion-dollar film, was released way back on July 2nd, and it was actually the second of the two films that I saw, but I’ll be talking about it here first given its earlier release date (tune in next week for my thoughts on Crawl, that ridiculous alligator-hurricane horror film that has been surprising people on the Rotten Tomatoes scoreboard).  After a month of having had this film available to you – and I say this knowing full well that it took me over a month to write about it – I feel like I don’t super need a spoiler warning, but here’s one for you anyways: I’m going to be at least hinting at major plot points below, and if you aren’t familiar with the characters of Spider-Man and Mysterio in the comics, you may want to wait to see this movie before reading, however far in the future that may be for you.

A question my boy Tobey was probably never fit to answer given the continued aging of his movies: does Spider-Man text and swing, and if so, what does it look like?

To say the least, Far From Home is exactly what you’d expect, but that doesn’t really make it any less fun than it is.  Like any Marvel movie worth its salt, it contains a smattering of family-friendly one-liners, a few of which are legitimately funny, and it’s packed with comic book beat-em-up action.  The visuals – best highlighted by the Elemental fights and (later on) the Mysterio mind-melding special effects sequences, which play much like scenes from Doctor Strange in all their mysticism – are predictably excellent and on-par with the surrounding universe, and Michael Giacchino‘s jaunty score reprises a number of the themes introduced in Spider-Man: Homecoming.  None of it – save, perhaps, for Zendaya‘s interesting take on Mary Jane, her awareness of Peter’s secret (great poke-fun-at-yourself moment here) and her eventual folding into the group that Peter’s friend Ned dubs “FOS – Friends of Spider-Man” – is particularly new or exciting relative to both the practices of the surrounding MCU and the Spider-Man mythos as we’ve known it since the Tobey Maguire days, but that certainly doesn’t mean it’s bad or remotely the worst of the countless Spider-Man films we’ve been given; we need only revisit the Andrew Garfield era, which wasn’t even all that bad in its own right, to be reminded of that.  Couched within its MCU clothing, Far From Home does its best to contain a teenaged love story that has its fair share of cute moments, and certainly does its damnedest to diversify the film from its contemporaries using that juicy center, but that’s about its only real source of originality.

The dreaded Hybrid Elemental: a combination of Earth, Wind, Fire, and Water, and most likely a CGI nightmare for some poor overworked Marvel Studios graphic artist.

Spider-Man: Far From Home is in the unique position of having to clean up a lot of the plot-hole-riddled mess left behind by Avengers: Endgame, and it does this fairly well, even going so far as to take advantage of the fact that age gaps have changed in light of the “blip” (why they changed the terminology from the original “Snap” I do not know) in the form of comedy (at one point, we find the ever-annoying and cleverly reinvented Flash Thompson trying to order an alcoholic drink but being refused because he spent five years “blipped”).  Some of this expositional detail isn’t delivered quite as gracefully as it could have been, following the format of Homecoming to breathlessly cram as much catch-up data as possible into a beginning segment that’s framed as a student-made YouTube video, but given the task of explaining to audiences how things will be post-Snap, along with the time constraints, it’s at bare minimum a reasonable attempt.  And as can be readily imagined based on the outcome of the Endgame, and as promised by Far From Home‘s spoilerific final trailer that came out just after Endgame was released, a lot of the emotional content of Spider-Man’s second MCU outing focuses on Peter Parker’s addressing both his grief in the absence of mentor/father figure Tony Stark and the feeling that the metal shoes left behind are his to fill.  This last transitional vestige of Phase 3 is handled reasonably well here, allowing for some well-composed scenes involving the oft-forgotten Happy Hogan, and naturally appearing to indeed frame Peter Parker as the prodigal son inheriting Stark’s tech wisdom, heroic mantle, and of course his toys.  Tom Holland certainly seems up to the task, and continues to be one of the MCU’s most exciting young stars, urging us to hope that with all of the craziness promised in Phase 4, and with the continued contract dispute between Marvel and Sony, he remains involved.

The MCU’s take on Spider-Man’s Stealth Suit, which essentially looks like what Idris Elba is wearing for all of Hobbs & Shaw.  Maybe they have a costume-sharing deal between the franchises?

But Spider-Man’s biggest weakness is in a sense also it’s biggest strength, and this goes back to its source material.  A problem that I don’t often encounter when watching entries in the MCU – both because of my own lack of familiarity and because of Marvel’s too-occasional penchant for making bold character choices – is knowing what’s going to happen because I have a certain (limited) degree of knowledge about the comics upon which the films are based, but in Spider-Man: Far From Home, anyone who is aware of Spider-Man beyond the many films featuring him will know that Jake Gyllenhaal‘s Quentin Beck will turn out to be a turncoat.  While I’ll readily admit that this made Mysterio essentially no less fun to watch, and while such a phenomenon has also surely shown up in other films, laying character’s hidden motives bare for any of Marvel’s truly initiated (Aldrich Killian in Iron Man 3, anyone?), it inevitably takes a bit of the wind out of the sails of the big reveal scene in Prague.  It’s still very well-sold by Gyllenhaal, who is clearly having the time of his life being part of the MCU – and who reportedly wanted to be seen wearing his suit whenever possible on camera – but knowing that the turn is coming only adds to the sense of “let’s get this over with” that the film at times seems to weirdly embrace.  With all that said, the cameos involved in the reveal of Beck’s special-effects team are awfully fun, providing an Endgame-ish set of flashbacks to Iron Man and Civil War while also posthumously calling into question Tony Stark’s already arguably dubious code of ethics.

Quentin Beck: known thanks exclusively to an Italian newscast as Mysterio.

Spider-Man: Far From Home doesn’t find the MCU quite at the height of its powers, nor the height that Endgame reached, but if you saw it with such high expectations as those, you probably shouldn’t have, and were bound to be let down in some way.  For what it is – the latest standalone entry in an ages-old character’s story, pitting him against a classic villain with a new MCU-ified twist while shooting some of its subtler webs in the direction of future films – it’s probably about as good as it could have been.  The mid- and post-credits scenes, complete with a downright glorious J.K. Simmons cameo in his fated return as J. Jonah Jameson, give us a meaty cliffhanger for Spider-Man’s own character arc while also fueling the fiery question on everyone’s mind by the film’s end: where are the Avengers, and why are they leaving a kid to fend for himself?  We’ll assumedly find out in Phase 4.

Zendaya’s Mary Jane, shown here thinking about how much dating Spider-Man is going to improve her morning commute.

Tune in next week for something completely different: a discussion of the zany but decently-crafted survival antics of Crawl.  In the meantime, thanks for reading!

Captain Marvel Review, or: A List of Reasons Why Marvel Movies Have a Marvel Problem

Captain Marvel – the first big MCU film of 2019, and certainly not the last (with Avengers: Endgame and Spider-Man: Far from Home on the way this summer).  Released on International Women’s Day, Captain Marvel is the biggest franchise in Hollywood’s first film with a female protagonist, and is also directed and co-written by women, which immediately begs the question: is it as good as Wonder Woman (i.e. really good)?  Is it better?  Is it worse?  That’s one of many questions I’ll try to answer here, but after talking a bit about Captain Marvel and its ups and downs, I expect to naturally segue into a discussion of why Marvel movies are in a rut, and likely will be for the foreseeable future, with one or two exceptions.

Carol “Avenger” Danvers.  Vers for short.

The word that jumps to mind when I think of my Captain Marvel experience is “fine.”  It was fine-to-good on average, mostly because it had some great parts and some not so great parts, much like most fine things.  What people reading this may care about most is the fact that it has the appropriate amount of tie-ins with the rest of the Marvel universe, in particular featuring a mid-credits scene that builds hype for Endgame in a solid and tangible way and draws exactly the connection you’re probably hoping to see.  In that way and all others, it’s the origin story you’d expect, with some excellent high points involving the theme of female empowerment and a second-act turn that I must give a small amount of credit to for being the most unexpected (read: still fairly expected) part of the film.  The visual effects are Marvel-grade, with the constant de-aging of Samuel L. Jackson (rookie Shield agent Nick Fury) and Clark Gregg (even more rookie Shield agent Phil Coulson) standing out as the most impressive.  Brie Larson‘s performance was neither incredible nor underwhelming, with the rest of the cast (Ben Mendelsohn, Jude Law, Jackson, Gregg) doing pretty much the same across the board.  Let’s face it: Marvel movies simply don’t demand much out of their actors and actresses, and that’s just fine.

Jude Law’s contacts went a pretty long way in terms of making him look like an alien – props to Captain Marvel’s makeup department.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the film overall is the fact that for an origin story, it more often than not fails to do one of the things that origin stories are typically responsible for: explain the protagonist’s powers.  Let me be clear: it explains the origin of the powers just fine, but never really explains the powers themselves, allowing them to be pretty nebulous from start to finish and framing Carol Danvers as more of an unstoppable Superman-like hero than I’d like, especially after the climactic “becoming the true hero” scene towards the film’s end (seriously, what is that chip in her head? They never even attempt to explain this).  This is a bit of a double-edged sword in that it keeps us guessing as to what Captain Marvel is capable of, which is at least mildly engaging, but is also makes her essentially infallible as I’ve already mentioned, and furthermore it cements the film as an experience that’s surprisingly not mandatory viewing pre-Endgame, given that you’ll know roughly as much about her abilities if you haven’t seen Captain Marvel as you will if you’ve only seen the trailer.

It’s about time we got an MCU hero that sports a mohawk.

But here’s the main point I want to make with this review: most of what unfolds in Captain Marvel amounts to nothing more than checking boxes, and to be clear, its creators are pretty darn good at checking those boxes.  There’s no doubt that the movie has some fun moments, some funny moments, and especially some empowering moments with at least a medium-rare emotional core, but at the end of the day, it also feels like there’s very little heart in any of it.  If there’s any heart anywhere, it’s probably in the film’s moral thesis of female empowerment, as it should be, but the narrative itself is largely devoid of passion, and it shows.  It’s hard to blame Captain Marvel‘s creators for this, though, as it’s not hard to envision a scenario in which their potential for imagination and creativity is hamstrung by the need to stay within the MCU’s electric fence and, well, check boxes.  Effective but occasionally clunky broad-strokes characterization is essentially an MCU hallmark at this point, as is a sprinkling of PG bits of situational humor that always seem to come at certain predetermined times in the films’ action, and fail among many other elements to be completely original or truly gut-busting funny.  On top of that, there also looms the MCU’s biggest issue of all, and that’s the setting of stakes.

The Skrulls – the latest alien race the MCU is introducing us to.

Here’s my likely unoriginal and not-hard-to-reach conclusion about the current age of Marvel movies: they can simply no longer be interesting unless the stakes are truly titanic.  To put it another way: at no point during Captain Marvel are we ever concerned about Danvers or any of her friends falling into legitimate mortal peril, and at no point are we ever concerned about Larson’s character overcoming any obstacle or achieving a given objective.  Again, this is hardly the fault of the screenwriters, as they’re being told to tell a story that’s essentially predetermined, and this is a dramatic quandary that has plagued all Marvel movies for the past few years that have not been Infinity War.  What made Infinity War so compelling were the titanic stakes set by Thanos, the harbinger of doom employed for numerous post-credits scenes, coming to end it all, and the fact that its creators finally had the temporal buildup to start making choices of actual import with regards to the lives and deaths of characters that we’ve been conditioned over multiple films to actually care about.  An exception to this rule, and proof that this dramatic quandary can be conquered with a certain game-changing sense of style that Captain Marvel arguably lacked, was 2018’s Black Panther.  Another non-Marvel piece of superhero IP that falls into this category of genre rejuvenation is Deadpool.

My perception of myself after I go to the gym once.

And yes, before you say as much: I know that in order to get lovable characters and plotline-combining epics like Infinity War, you at some point need easygoing origin stories like Captain Marvel, but at the same time, there’s only so much of this on repeat that an audience can take over a brief 10-year MCU lifetime before heading to the exits (if the box office is any indication, we clearly haven’t hit that point yet, but I feel that it’s coming).  The failing of Captain Marvel (and other recent MCU films like it) to pose a dramatic question that has a difficult answer takes all of the air out of the film’s ultra-predictable and also somehow logistically confusing climactic sequence, and instead lends it to elements that are probably intended to be secondary, and gives scenes focused on Nick Fury and Phil Coulson’s backgrounds a lot more weight than was likely intended, and for a simple reason: these characters, characters with multi-movie and multi-show arcs, are the ones that we care about.  In fact, chunks of the film serve as a better origin story for Fury than it does for Carol Danvers, and we the audience do get a great two-for-one deal in that way, but it also strikes me as a problem when we’re more concerned with determining how Nick Fury loses his eye than with how Captain Marvel is going to win, and become the day-saver we’re teased with at the end of Infinity War.  You do find out how he loses the eye, by the way.

Pre-eyepatch post-digital-manipulation Nick Fury.

Captain Marvel certainly has the heart of Wonder Woman, and a great message, but it lacks the directing talent of its predecessor, and furthermore doesn’t seem to have as much of a spring in its step as 2017’s Amazonian adventure.  While it goes through the motions and hits all of the typical beats in arguably the exact right way, it’ll be precisely what you show up expecting to see, and for that reason alone, it more often than not fails to excite or revitalize the genre.  And yes – before you ask, I know full well that I’m saying all of this while lowering myself into the gears of the Marvel machine to the tune of $11 and a whopping $455 million opening weekend – the same churning gears that seem well-suited to smushing the creative will of the filmmakers the MCU has ensnared with its promise of boundless riches.

Glass Review

Look – when I sat down in front of the blinking cursor here, I had a choice to make between two paths.  The first path led to a review of 2001: A Space Odyssey, Stanley Kubrick‘s supposed masterpiece, which I watched this past Friday night and was wholly underwhelmed by (fight me, internet).  The second and more commercially relevant path, and the one I’ll be taking, leads to a review of Glass, M. Night Shyamalan‘s latest work and the culmination of what is now being called the Eastrail 177 Trilogy.  I’ve written a post in the past about Shyamalan’s (better) movies and why I think they’re great, and Unbreakable – the first film in the aforementioned trilogy – was heavily featured in that post, so I was really looking forward to Glass and its immense promise of returning David Dunn and Elijah Price to the big screen, even in spite of the critical panning it has been forced to endure over the past few weeks.  To summarize my thoughts, though, I’m here to tell you why it’s certainly not deserving of the 36% critics’ consensus it currently has on Rotten Tomatoes – its audience score of 79%, while a bit high, is definitely closer to the mark it deserves, but maybe that’s just the audience member in me shouting down the critic.  In any case, and before we continue, I should note that what follows is laced with spoilers, so proceed at your own risk.

Of the three, the Mr. Glass aesthetic has to be my favorite, from colors to costumes and back.

My current theory as to why Glass is being so maligned by critics is that these critics showed up expecting something that they were never going to get.  For one, these people may have been wanting a twist as good as Unbreakable’s, which is a fair desire, but which in my mind is simply unattainable.  Indeed, I should also say that Glass is not as good as Unbreakable – which may be Shyamalan’s best, depending on my mood – by any means, and it might not even be as good as Split, but it’s simply not as objectionable a movie as is being claimed, and that’s the main point I want to make here.  Aesthetically, it’s a great film, with a healthy dose of Shyamalan’s typically superb shot composition and the same great use of color we saw in Unbreakable – we still see green predominantly associated with David Dunn, purple with Mr. Glass, and now yellow with The Horde, with supposed reasons for all of these associations that go beyond which colors are simply Mr. Shyamalan’s favorites.  Thematically, I think the majority of Glass is also fantastic, and it makes a lot of great dramatic choices while leaning fully into the comic-book motif (with Elijah Price verbalizing these parallels throughout in a way that I found quite pleasing), but its execution, specifically in scene-to-scene plotting, leaves something to be desired, which may be what’s drawing the ire of many critics.  What results is a decent number of holes that can be readily walked through, especially if poking holes in it is your game.  For one, wow are those some dumb nurses.

You’re not as bad as the guy harping on and on about Vitamin D, but you’re still a big dummy.

Glass is probably at its best when it’s laying down callouts to the past two films in its trilogy, featuring a decent amount of unseen archive footage from the first film and even bringing back some long-gone characters from both that you didn’t know you missed.  Anya Taylor-Joy’s portions of the film are surprisingly emotional, and probably give Glass its heart if it has one, with her scene featuring Kevin’s death in particular being powerful in a way that I did not anticipate.  Similarly, Spencer Treat Clark‘s Joseph Dunn – the son of David Dunn, who facially seems to have not aged a day – is involved in a way that also adds another element to Glass, allowing easy personification of the sense of doubt that many characters (and the audience) are likely feeling during the second act, when the superhuman powers of the protagonist and antagonists alike are being questioned.  The cogent use of Clark’s character gives noticeably more weight to the climax of the film, in which the powers in question are shown to us to be very real, and perhaps not as uncommon as we’d all previously thought.

Between Unbreakable and Die Hard, Bruce Willis probably feels legitimately unkillable at this point.

This brings me to where I feel Glass was at its worst, and this shows up in Shyamalan’s trademark ending twist, which I feel could be argued gets away from itself more than a little bit.  The emotional elements of the ending shift are great and fairly strong, but the mechanics of it, which essentially result in the reveal of a massive top-secret organization designed to hide superhumans from public view, take us away from one of the best things about the Eastrail 177 Trilogy: the small, reasonable, and manageable scope of the world the characters are in (basically just everyday Philadelphia).  That’s what differentiates movies like these from the MCU and other films of that ilk, and it has done so in a good way and even before its time.  To again reference Unbreakable, and to reference the comic book parlance that the Eastrail 177 Trilogy so gleefully avails itself of, it was an origin story, yes, but what made it better was that it was also significantly more personal.  The stakes were low.  For the majority of the film, at least, a city wasn’t in mortal danger, the world wasn’t in mortal danger, nor was the universe in mortal danger.  Unbreakable was about two men, their families, and their struggles to find a place in the world given their unnatural talents.  The plot device that provides Glass‘s ending message takes us further away from that dynamic and dilutes its power.

You can’t beat The Beast!

The other major irksome element of Glass to me was the film’s insistence on hitting us over the head with the “reveal” that we all saw coming: the fact that Kevin Wendell Crumb’s father had been killed in the same train accident in which David Dunn’s powers were fully realized – an accident, mind you, which Mr. Glass is revealed at the end of Unbreakable to have caused.  This was in my opinion a predictable turn, but it feels at times as though Shyamalan actively disrespects his audience by assuming that we don’t remember or care about the details of his past films, instead turning a highly telegraphed plot point into something he can beat us over the head with.  This is forgiven, among many other parts of the film, though, by some truly phenomenal acting on the part of James McAvoy, whom I daresay is unlikely to get the recognition – at least in terms of tangible accolades and awards – that he deserves.  It’s a bit of a hokey character that he plays both here and in Split, which is likely why he won’t earn any Oscar or Golden Globe nods, but it’s also a really cool character to see brought to life in that it’s basically internal conflict externalized for the viewer to see.  While there are certainly no slouches among the principle cast – Bruce Willis and Samuel L. Jackson reprise their roles unflinchingly, and Sarah Paulson provides an excellent supporting presence – McAvoy is the clear standout.  The strength of the ensemble gives infinitely more power to the bold (but correct) choice at the film’s end to kill the three main characters – a choice which provides a great wrap on the trilogy in terms of the message that the film is allowed to end with, given Elijah’s last-gasp “mastermind” turn.

They always underestimate the mastermind…

Glass is a better film than it’s currently being given credit for, and grants a fitting end to the sagas of David Dunn, Elijah Price, and Kevin Wendell Crumb.  While it may not measure up to its predecessors, you can do far worse in your search for a cold-weather diversion this January.  Thanks for reading!

And now, the question on maybe some of your minds: will I ever review 2001: A Space Odyssey?  It remains to be seen, but for now rest assured that my review would likely amount to a lot of lamentation about profound lack of plot.

Incredibles 2 Review

This week’s post is about Incredibles 2, the long-awaited sequel to The Incredibles without the “The” that has both the box office and the animated moviegoing public profoundly abuzz.  I caught a matinee this past Sunday, and the theater was in fact nearly full – mostly of children, which led to a slightly noisier movie experience than usual, but a positive one nonetheless.

As promised by the marketing, Incredibles 2 picks up right where the first film left off.

First, a rapid-fire list some of Incredibles 2‘s many strong points: stellar animation (more or less a given with Pixar at this point, but still worth mentioning all the same), a solid dose of humor (more so than The Incredibles, I’d argue), some fantastic superhero additions (seriously, Void is awesome), and a solid storyline with some great progressive elements.  Traditional gender roles, especially in a familial context, are discussed a significant amount, both overtly – in some cases with lines written right in the screenplay – and more subtly, but no matter what the visibility of a given scene’s treatment of the issue is, it’s typically a graceful treatment throughout.  The satisfying crispness of the visuals is on display no more clearly than during the action scenes, which are the perfect amount of high-strung for a PG-rated family film, and peppered with the proper amount of dialogue.  In an era of near-constant blockbuster flicks featuring characters that can do all sorts of superhuman things, Incredibles 2 is notable enough simply in that it manages to set itself apart from that pack, and it does so primarily with injection of a visual style into its action that’s arguably only possible in the arena of animation.  The aforementioned addition of superheroes, while at times feeling like a bit of a crowd, also helps to fill these scenes out, as does Michael Giacchino‘s Mancini-and-Barry inspired jazz score, which is every bit as excellent as the first film’s.

The augmentation of the franchise’s supporting cast with more “supers” is one of Incredibles 2’s biggest victories.

As for the humor, it’s more often than not driven by those reversed gender roles, with Mr. Incredible – formerly one of the world’s most well-known and well-respected superheroes, and with a thinly-veiled masculine ego that seems to say that he’s all too aware of this fact – relegated to the Parr family’s homemaker role, and becoming the subject of numerous domestic pitfalls as a result of his inexperience.  Continually compounding his troubles is the fact that caring for infant Jack-Jack – a challenge in its own right – involves both discovery and mitigation of his numerous powers, ranging from dimensional shifting to laser-sight to sneeze-induced flight.  Indeed, Jack-Jack is a central character in Incredibles 2‘s narrative, even in spite of having no dialogue and no discernible control over his abilities, and while he typically serves as a conflict-inducer during the film’s first and second acts – with family members constantly shirking the responsibility of caring for him and quite literally tossing him around like a football from the word go – he becomes something else entirely as the film’s plot develops.  His interaction with Edna Mode is also one of the film’s single best points of comedy.

“Doozles are Dozing” – what a timeless classic.

In terms of the struggles that Incredibles 2 brings, the only major ones that come to mind all stem from the fact that the film seems to be trying to pack quite a lot of material into what’s already a fairly long movie (118 minutes).  Whether this is because of all of the creative buildup on the part of Bird and the animators over the franchise’s near 14-year hiatus or due to some other unknown creative factor, what it often results in is scenes that are at times breathlessly paced.  This occasionally shows up in dialogue that seems out of place in its Sorkinian nature, or in character-building moments that are forced to take place in a single line when they may in fact be deserving of an entire scene’s worth of content.  This frenetic style is certainly in keeping with the action sequences, which are suitably fast-paced, but is also shown to hamstring the film in its more poignant moments, potentially keeping it from delivering any sort of potent emotional payloads like those of Pixar’s better entries (Up, Inside Out, etc.).  It could surely be argued that Incredibles 2, much like The Incredibles, is hardly the venue for such catharsis, and most of the time, it’s fine that it’s not – however, Incredibles 2‘s occasional direct challenge of the aforementioned questions related to traditional gender roles could be misconstrued (at least by me) as setting the stage for such emotional revelations and not fully delivering on them.

The Elastigirl bike-chase sequence is one of the best in the film.

With the exception of Dash’s voice actor – whose voice deepened over the course of the 14-year gap and forced him out of the role – all of the core original voice talent returns, with Craig T. Nelson (Mr. Incredible), Holly Hunter (Elastigirl), and Samuel L. Jackson (the ultra-cool Frozone) leading a strong cast that also happens to include writer-director Brad Bird himself, returning as semi-iconic superhero fashion designer Edna Mode.  Incredibles 2‘s new additions most notably include Bob Odenkirk and Catherine Keener as Austin and Evelyn Deavor respectively, a brother-sister pair that owns DevTech, a purportedly mammoth telecommunications company that’s named in keeping with the theme of the Incredibles franchise’s seeming penchant for institution/location monikers that are simultaneously tongue-in-cheek and generic (see: Nomanisan Island, Municiberg, Metroville, and New Urbem).  As with all of Pixar’s films, the voice work is brilliant, especially in the case of Hunter and Keener; Nelson’s age shows up a bit in his vocal performance if you ask me, which is obviously understandable after the passage of nearly 14 years – it just shows up more harshly in a direct sequel that begins immediately where the first film ended, at least temporally speaking.

TFW you take a picture of a group of superheroes and they aren’t ready for it.

To me, what Incredibles 2 winds up being is a Pixar movie that’s middle-of-the-road to upper-middle-of-the-road compared to all of the other animation studio’s (fantastic) efforts.  While certainly funnier than most, and not without its redeeming action sequences, its resounding commercial success is in my opinion more easily explained by the long-overdue nature of the sequel than by any specific cinematic virtue.  Either way, and regardless of any one opinion, it’s a clear success that warrants viewing.